You're Going to Die, Brother
by Da Phoenix 13
Summary: Thanks to a freak accident, Percy has gone back to the night of the battle and manages to save Fred's life. But the universe, unfortunately, has a habit of course correcting...
1. Chapter 1

_Much as I dislike Percy, I felt compelled to write this story about him. Plus I was watching Lost last weekend and one episode in particular stuck with me... maybe those of you who watch the show know what I'm talking about and can see where this is going. I sure hope not. I hate people who spoil the surprise._

_Set near the end of DH, this is the story of Percy's struggle to come to terms with Fred's death... though in a rather unusual way. I hope you all enjoy this, it's the result of a late-night global homework session and my overactive, plagiarizing mind. (It just took me like 10 minutes to remember the word "plagiarism". That's how tired I am.)_

_Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm American. J.K Rowling is British. And that's all I'm going to say about that._

* * *

Percy Weasley stood numb with shock in front of the gravestone of his little brother. Even though Fred had died a whole week earlier, he still found it hard to believe that he was gone forever. All around him, Fred's family and friends stood around the grave, some weeping openly, others doing their best to put on a brave face for the grieving family. The funeral had ended nearly twenty minutes earlier, yet most of the mourners were still there, finding it nearly impossible to say goodbye to their beloved prankster. 

One mourner in particular, however, stood out in the crowd. Fred's twin brother stood a little apart from the others, his only outward sign of sorrow being the large bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey that he was polishing off by himself. Frowning slightly, Percy made his way over to George, trying to ignore how much he looked like the brother he would never see again.

"Do you seriously have to do that right now?" he asked his younger brother, irritated.

Though more than half the bottle of firewhiskey was gone, George was still standing quite steadily. "'S good stuff, this Ogden's," he told Percy matter-of-factly. "Only the best for my brother." As he spoke, he raised the bottle to the freshly carved headstone. "Here's to you, Fred," he said solemnly, pouring out a considerable amount of alcohol onto the grave.

"Stop that," Percy told him forcefully, seizing his wrist to pull the bottle upright. "What's Mum going to think of that kind of behavior?"

"I don't think she minds," said George, swaying slightly as he stole a glance at their inconsolable mother, who was sobbing as she gripped Fred's headstone, their father attempting to drag her away. Sighing, Percy left George to his drinking as he went to stare at the headstone once more:

_Fred Gideon Weasley_

_1 April 1978 – 19 May 1998_

_"Mischief managed"_

Percy wiped away the tears under his glasses that he hadn't even known were there until now. Seeing those words carved in the cold stone drove home the reality that Fred was gone forever, that Percy would never be able to see or talk to him again, never be able to share a stupid joke with him –

"I wish I could go back," he whispered so softly that no one could hear him. "If only I could go back to the battle… I'd be able to save him, I know it…" The tears were falling faster now, and he made no attempt to wipe them away. The fact was that he blamed himself for letting Fred get killed; he knew that if he hadn't tried to joke around with him, there was a chance that Fred might have gotten out of the way of that crumbling wall, and that none of them would be here right now. Everything would go back to normal, if only Fred was still alive.

"To Fred!" he heard George shout as though from a great distance away, as he lit off several Weasleys' Wildfire Whiz-Bangs. Unfortunately, George was too intoxicated to know what he was doing; instead of shooting into the air like they were supposed to (or maybe that was just how the fireworks were supposed to work), they shot into the crowd of mourners, making them shriek and duck for cover. But Percy took just a second too long to react to what was happening… he saw a rocket heading right for him and made no attempt to get out of the way.

"_Percy!_" he heard his mother shriek as the firework made contact. There was a flash of blinding light, a searing pain at the back of his head where it made contact with Fred's headstone, and then –

Nothing.

---

"Percy? _Percy!_"

Percy moaned in pain, lying on his back. His head was still throbbing painfully where it had hit the headstone, and he made no attempt to open his eyes.

"Perce?" It was his mother's voice, low and soothing. "Perce, can you hear me?"

"Way to go, George!" came Ginny's reproachful voice. "He finally comes back to us, and you go and knock him out!"

"I'm sorry!" said George defensively. "Is it my fault that I missed him so much, I accidentally knocked him over when I tried to give him a hug?"

Percy was bewildered. What were they talking about? Hadn't there been a fireworks mishap? What was all this about George trying to hug him?

"Yeah, good one, Forge!" came a teasing, laughing voice. Percy froze in shock… he certainly had never expected to hear that voice again. Only the complete surprise of hearing it forced him to open his eyes.

"F-Fred?" he said shakily. "Is it really you?"

Sure enough, Fred stood around Percy's prone figure with the rest of his concerned family members: his mother was feeling his forehead with concern, his father was stroking the hair off his forehead, Bill and Ginny were kneeling by his side, and the twins were laughing together at George's apparent clumsiness. The sight of the two of them together was something Percy had never thought he would see again, and the image brought unexpected tears to his eyes.

"Fred!" Percy gasped, jumping suddenly to his feet and rushing over to his younger brother. "You're all right!" He wrapped Fred in a tight hug, afraid that he would evaporate if he let him go.

"Well, of course he is," said Bill, frowning in confusion over Percy's actions. "But he won't be if you don't let him get some air!" Blushing, Percy let Fred go, though reluctantly, still staring at his little brother's face as though he couldn't look at him long enough.

Fred shifted his feet awkwardly. "Well, that's enough of that, Bighead Boy," he said, trying to lighten the serious mood Percy's reaction had created. "Ready to go kill You-Know-Who, then?"

"Wh-what?" Percy stammered, completely thrown by this new bit of information. For the first time, he took in his surroundings: There were Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw tapestries hanging on the walls, hammocks all over the place, and a large wireless in the corner. Something about this room seemed very familiar, but Percy couldn't quite place it… "Where are we?" he asked his family at large.

"Um, the Room of Requirement?" said Ginny in a very "duh" sort of voice. "Don't you remember? You just came through that passageway – " she pointed at the back of a painting hanging on the wall " – asking if you had gotten here in time for the battle against Voldemort, and then you and Dad made up?"

And slowly, it was all coming back to Percy… this was the night of the Battle of Hogwarts, no one had died yet, the war was still going on… Somehow – and he had no idea how it had happened – he had gone back to the night Fred had died, only he could still remember every detail of the battle and its aftermath. One particular detail came floating back through Percy's memory, and he turned to scowl at his mother.

"Did you push Fred aside for me just now?" he asked her sternly.

"Oh, thank Merlin, he's got his memory back!" said George in a mock-grateful voice.

Mrs. Weasley turned slightly pink. "Well… yes, I suppose I did," she finally said sheepishly.

"You shouldn't have done that," he told her firmly. "You're going to regret it…" He recalled how for days after Fred's death, his mother had cried over this one simple action, saying how she had rejected her son right before he had been killed, and what a horrible mother she was.

"Um… well, all right," said Mrs. Weasley uncertainly. "I'm sorry," she told Fred, turning to him.

"That's okay," responded Fred nonchalantly, obviously as confused as she was. A rather awkward silence followed, which Fred broke by saying, "Well, if we're done being sentimental, shall we go off to war now?"

"No!" Percy tried to say, but it was already too late. Fred had bounded out of the room, closely followed by George. Percy ran after them, trying to stop Fred from entering this battle. He didn't know or care how it had happened, but he had been given a second chance to save Fred's life, and he would be damned if he let his brother die a second time.

* * *

_Sorry about any inconsistencies with the book, I don't have it with me right now. But hopefully you all have picked up that Percy's gone back in time to the night of the battle with the knowledge of how to save Fred. Will it work?! If you review, maybe I'll post chapter 2 and let you find out. :)_


	2. Chapter 2

"Blimey, that was some scene back there in the Room of Requirement, huh?" Fred asked George as they began to walk to the passageway of the one-eyed witch with a small cluster of students.

"You mean, with Percy?" George nodded in agreement. "I think he must have hit his head harder than Mum thought."

Fred frowned contemplatively. "I hope he can handle himself out there…" He sincerely hoped that Percy hadn't come back to their family just in time to get a concussion- he didn't want Percy to get hurt just because he had suffered some sort of shock to his system.

"He'll be fine, he's Percy," said George reassuringly. He paused in front of the one-eyed witch statue, looking at it thoughtfully. "You know, there are other ways to get into the school than just this one passageway," he said slowly. "Maybe one of us should stay here in the East Wing and the other should cover the West Wing…"

Fred turned to look at his twin in alarm. "You want us to split up?" he said sharply.

"It just makes more sense to," said George sensibly. "Here… I'll stay here with half the troops, and you can take the other half to that tunnel behind the bust of Paracelsus…"

Fred stood still for a moment, then gripped his brother in a tight hug. "Take care, George," he said thickly through the tears that had suddenly flooded his eyes. He didn't know why, but he had just sensed the premonition that they wouldn't see each other again. It had just hit him that this was a war; it wasn't some kind of a game, and there was a chance that one of them wouldn't survive…

He wasn't sure if George had sensed the same thing he had; but at any rate, his twin returned the hug and said into his ear, "Yeah, you too, Fred. See you- see you on the other side, okay?"

Fred gulped and nodded silently. Then the twins heard a bloodcurdling scream rent the air-

"That must mean the battle's starting!" Lee Jordan yelled from behind Fred. "Come on, we've still got to get in position!" Wiping his eyes hurriedly, Fred broke away from George and sprinted off down the corridor, waving at his twin over his shoulder for what he sincerely hoped wouldn't be the last time.

---

A clock nearby struck midnight, and Percy heard a bloodcurdling scream tear through the night. He remembered this from last time: it meant that the battle had begun. Again. Percy was still struggling with his newfound realization that he had the ability to save Fred's life. But there was one small problem:

He had no idea where Fred was.

After pursuing the twins down the corridors, he and the rest of his family had arrived in the Great Hall, where he, Bill, Molly, and Arthur had been told to go fight in the grounds; Ron had disappeared to who-knew-where. Ginny would hopefully be staying in the Room of Requirement, while Fred and George were leading the troops guarding the secret passageways. But in all the chaos of organizing the fighters, Percy had lost sight of his once-dead brother, and now he didn't have the slightest idea of how to find him.

_Think,_ Percy told himself sternly. _How did you find him last time?_ But though he racked his brains to try and remember, he couldn't quite remember how he had found Fred the first time. He could only recall certain disconnected images of the battle: bursts of light against the blackened sky; the shattered forms of the staffroom gargoyles; the sound of Fred's laughter… and the horrible sensation that the air had exploded-

Percy shook himself mentally. That wasn't going to happen again. He wouldn't let it.

His internal musings were cut off by the sudden appearance of a wave of Death Eaters rushing right at their little battalion. Curses streaked across the midnight sky – he gasped, for it all felt so familiar – and Percy drew his wand and began to fight…

It amazed Percy how his brain seemed to shut off as he fought off the Death Eaters; all thought seemed to cease as he became a creature driven by pure instinct, testosterone and adrenaline flooding through his veins as he Stunned Death Eater after Death Eater. For the first time in his life, his internal monologue had shut off completely, and only one lucid thought was running through his mind: _Get to Fred._

Before he knew it, he was no longer on the grounds. The Death Eaters must have forced them back into the castle, for now he was running through the corridors, dodging curses and flinging jinxes over his shoulder as he tried to get away from the thick of the action. He stumbled and almost fell on his face; looking back, he saw that he had tripped over the remains of the old staffroom gargoyles.

"I remember you too!" he shouted stupidly at their stone faces.

"Well, good for you, sonny Jim," said one of the gargoyles morosely. "Now quit yelling at us and go fight your sodding war!" Percy scrambled to his feet and turned to face the two masked Death Eaters that had been silently advancing on him during his conversation with the gargoyle.

"Well, well, well, what have we here?" rasped the first, pointing his wand at Percy's heart. "Wouldn't be a weasely little blood traitor, would it?"

"That's 'Weasley' to you," said Percy with a lot more bravery than he felt. He felt a shiver of fear travel down his spine, and he chided himself silently. Wasn't he supposed to be a Gryffindor? The second Death Eater laughed harshly.

"Likes to talk, this one does," he said roughly – Percy froze at the sound of the voice… it seemed so familiar, but he had no idea how to place it. "But we'll take care of that soon enough." He raised his wand.

But before the Death Eater could utter a single word, someone came bursting out from a passageway hidden behind a tapestry and pointed his own wand at the Death Eater. "_Protego__!"_ Fred yelled, deflecting the curse that had never come. The Shield Charm knocked the two Death Eaters back slightly, as Fred turned to Percy. "Perce, get out of here!" he yelled.

But Percy wasn't listening. "Fred!" he cried, overjoyed that his brother had managed to find him before something terrible had happened to him. "Listen… Fred, you've got to get out of here. Go back with Ginny to the Room of-"

Fred scoffed. "No way!" he said fiercely. "You all need me out here." He turned, noting that the Death Eaters had gotten back up and were now advancing on them. "Well, hello, boys," he said with the sort of playful air a superhero might have with his archnemesis in one of those comics Ron was always reading. "Come back to play, have you?"

Percy froze with the now-familiar sensation of déjà vu he had been experiencing all night. "Oh no," he murmured. "Fred, RUN!" He grabbed his brother by the collar and dragged him along the corridor, right as the Death Eaters began firing curses at the pair of them. Groaning with exasperation, Fred turned and ran with Percy.

"Bloody hell, Percy!" he panted as the two Weasley brothers dashed down the hallway, the Death Eaters right behind them. "You went and interrupted my heroic banter!"

"Sorry," Percy panted back, darting around the fallen bust of Paracelsus, "but we had to get out of there! You're about a split second away from-"

"From _what?_" Fred shot a half-exasperated, half-concerned look at Percy. "Look, I just saved your sorry arse from those two goons, so the least you can do is act grateful! And who says that just because we're in a war, we can't have any fun while we're battling evil?"

"Because – war – isn't – fun!" Percy bellowed, the awful memories of Fred's funeral drifting back to him. But as soon as the words were out he regretted them, feeling both childish and like a spoilsport. Fred was right: they were going to win the war anyway, so why not have a bit of fun with the losing side? His mind made up, Percy stopped running and turned around to face the Death Eaters, his wand drawn.

"Percy, what are you doing?!" But as soon as Fred saw that his brother was finally ready to fight, he grinned and took out his own wand.

"So the blood traitors are ready to fight," hissed the Death Eater whose voice sounded awfully familiar. "Well… so be it. _Crucio!_" he shouted, pointing his wand at Percy. He deflected the curse and began to duel, Fred taking the other Death Eater.

The Death Eaters' curses were driving them down the hallway, yet Percy had the distinct feeling that he and Fred were winning. Fred obviously felt the same way, as he crowed triumphantly and shouted to his dueling partner, "Oi, is this all you got?" He made quite a show of yawning as he fired a jinx at the Death Eater. Percy laughed; he had almost forgotten just how infectious Fred's good humor had been. At that moment, his Death Eater stumbled, his hood sliding off, and Percy finally realized why that voice had sounded so familiar: he had been dueling Pius Thicknesse, the Minister of Magic himself. Percy was suddenly seized with the mad desire to make a joke himself.

"Why, hello, Minister!" he said, shooting a neat jinx at his boss. "Did I mention I'm resigning?"

"You're JOKING, Perce!" Fred bellowed as he, too, felled his foe with a Stunner to the chest. Percy stopped dead, suddenly realizing what was about to happen. He looked over his shoulder anxiously: Harry, Ron, and Hermione were there too, standing off to the side, having obviously escaped from some sort of huge fire. Percy was drawn back to the task at hand as Fred burst into laughter.

"Perce… you actually ARE joking…"

Percy froze in horror as he heard that ominous rumbling sound that had haunted his nightmares for the past week. None of the others appeared to have heard it, all still too pleased with Percy's rare joke to care about what was about to happen to Fred...

"I don't think I've heard you joke since-"

"MOVE!!!!!!!" Percy screamed, throwing himself on Fred to get him out of the way. He was just in time – the air exploded, throwing Harry, Ron, and Hermione back against the wall, while Fred was pinned under him. It felt like the whole world had been blown apart by a simple spell… but if Fred was still alive, perhaps the world hadn't ended after all…

With the dust settling, Percy finally raised his head to look at the others. Harry was sitting up in a corner, feeling his wounded head gingerly; Hermione, meanwhile, was being helped to her shaky feet by Ron. Percy breathed a sigh of relief… good. They were all still okay. But there was still the matter of Fred…

"Perce…" came a muffled voice from under him, "I appreciate you saving me and all, but do you think you could get off me now?"

Percy obliged, scrambling to his feet as he helped dust Fred off. "Fred!" he gasped. "Oh, thank Merlin you're all right!"

Fred was sitting up; there was a great gash on his arm and he had a cut lip, but other than that he was just fine. Percy laughed with relief and hugged his brother tightly. "For a moment, I thought… I thought…"

"Percy, what is WRONG with you?" said Fred, exasperated, pushing Percy off him for what felt like the thousandth time in the past hour. "You've got to pull yourself together; we're not out of the woods yet!" He pointed over Percy's shoulder, as he turned to stare, horrified, at the acromantula who was fighting to get through the hole in the castle wall. The five of them worked together to drive off the spider, then Harry, Ron, and Hermione ran off down another corridor as more giant spiders began fighting their way through the hole.

"Where do you think you're going?" Fred shouted after the three of them; Percy, on the other hand, could care less what Ron and his friends were up to. He had Fred back, and that was all that mattered at the moment.

---

The battle had ceased for now: the Death Eaters had all retreated, though Voldemort's demand for Harry Potter was still ringing in Fred's ears. He walked beside Percy to the Great Hall, trying to ignore the fact that Percy wouldn't stop staring at him. He didn't know what exactly was wrong with Percy: for the moment, he decided to blame it on the concussion his brother obviously had. The two brothers burst through the door to the Great Hall when –

"Percy! Fred!"

Their mother came running up to the pair of them, enfolding both of them in her arms. "Oh, my boys!" she cried, kissing them both on the cheek. "You're all right!"

"Mum, get a grip!" said Fred, wriggling free of her grasp. He glanced over his shoulder at the rest of the family: Their dad was covered in dust, Bill was limping slightly, and Ginny's hair was so wild that she had obviously joined in the fighting… but where were Ron and George?

"Percy!" His brother turned to see his old girlfriend, Penelope Clearwater, running toward him; he grinned and wrapped her in his arms, kissing her fully on the mouth.

"That's disgusting, that is," said a voice in his ear. Fred whipped his head to see George shaking his head at the couple. "What's up, twin?"

"Hey yourself!" Fred laughed as he hugged George, clapping him on the back. "You haven't seen Ron around, have you?" But no sooner had he spoken than Ron and Hermione came bursting through the doors to the Great Hall.

"Oi, looking for us?" said George cheekily, flashing a winning smile at the two young wizards. Ron scowled at the pair of them, wrapping an arm around Hermione's waist.

"When did they get together?" Fred muttered.

"Who knows?" asked George, unconcerned. "So… how'd your part of the war go?"

"All right," said Fred, distracted by his memories of the exploding corridor. It had been the most peculiar feeling: as soon as the wall had collapsed, he had seen his life flash before his eyes, and it felt as though his soul had nearly parted company with his body… only to be pulled back in at the last second by Percy. "I almost died," he said confidentially to his twin. "And I can't help but feel like… maybe I was supposed to."

George's eyes widened. "I know what you mean," he whispered. "Because when we said goodbye, it- it really did feel like the last time I'd ever see you again, and…" He gulped suddenly, tears welling up in his eyes. "I knew I wouldn't be able to handle life without you." He looked away, as though embarrassed of the sentimentality of his words.

"I'd feel the same way if it had been you," Fred responded firmly, placing a hand on George's shoulder. He paused, wanting to talk more about what had happened, but unsure of how exactly to voice the suspicions he was beginning to have about Percy. However, there was no longer any opportunity to talk, for Voldemort's voice had just rung out across the grounds again, making everyone stop dead in their tracks.

_"Harry Potter is dead…"_

Fred heard no more after that. Harry, dead? It just didn't seem possible. He inadvertently caught a glimpse of Ron's, Hermione's, and Ginny's faces… they were all frozen with shock, and for the first time in a long time, his little sister looked close to tears.

Voldemort stopped speaking, and all around him the Great Hall was completely silent, full of people waiting with bated breath to hear their new instructions. Professor McGonagall was frozen at the Head table, clearly at a loss. But just then, Neville Longbottom stood up and addressed his fellow Hogwartsians.

"Well?" he demanded of them all. "Are you all just going to stand there and let Voldemort kill you, or are you going to fight back?" He began to pace, and Fred was irresistibly reminded of a general giving his troops a morale boost. Neville's eyes were aflame, and he was the only person in the Hall at the moment who looked like he had a clue of what to do. "Harry wouldn't want any of you to give up the fight, would he? He'd want us all to keep fighting, because…" Neville paused, looking around at all the weary battlers. "Because someone has to keep fighting evil," he ended in a whisper.

Fred knew that Neville was right. Exchanging a fervid look with George, Fred Weasley grinned and drew out his wand, ready to see this war out to the end...


	3. Chapter 3

Percy was practically skipping the next day, after the battle was over and Voldemort had finally been defeated by Harry. He was ecstatic to finally be able to go home, now that he had made up with his father, and he was feeling optimistic that his relationship with Penelope might start up again. But best of all, he knew there wouldn't be a funeral to go to this time. Because Fred had lived, everything would be all right again. His mother wouldn't walk around the house crying all the time, George wouldn't lock himself in his old room… he wouldn't have to wander aimlessly around the village of Ottery St. Catchpole looking for something that didn't remind him of Fred. The Weasley family could go back to normal. There would be laughter in their house again.

"We should all go out tonight!" Bill said to his brothers in a fit of good spirits, as they all sat around the kitchen table at the Burrow. "Just a couple of boys having some drinks in the Leaky Cauldron… what do you say?"

"I'm in!" said Fred gamely. He looked expectantly at George to agree with him, but George looked upset.

"Sorry, Bill, but I can't," he said remorsefully. "Our customers'll be wanting to buy a lot of fireworks to celebrate You-Know-Who's downfall, and we're almost out of stock. I've got to stay at the shop and make some more."

"Well, I'll help," Fred began, but George shook his head.

"That's all right, mate," he said easily to Fred, "you go out tonight. You deserve to have a little fun!" Fred grinned and shrugged as if to say, _All right then._

"Percy, what about you?" said Charlie, turning towards his younger brother. Percy hesitated, then nodded enthusiastically. He smiled, happy that his brothers were already willing to include him in their activities. He had been worried that his leaving had created a permanent rift between them, so he was pleased to see that even if his brothers were still mad at him, they were hiding their anger long enough to include him in their festivities.

"Can I come too?" asked Ron eagerly, and his older brothers all laughed at his demeanor. Even though Ron was eighteen, he was still just a little kid at heart, wanting his older brothers to include him in their games.

"Sure you can, brother!" said Fred, clapping Ron on the back. The six Weasley brothers all exited the kitchen, ready to Disapparate to their respective locations.

"Have a drink for me!" George called over to Fred as he Disapparated to Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes. Percy grinned as he and the rest of his brothers got ready for their night of drinking.

---

"Cheers!" Fred said, clinking his glass of firewhiskey with Ron's before drinking deeply. Percy gave a small smile before taking a swallow of his own drink.

Fred looked shrewdly over at Percy. Ever since hitting his head the night before, something had been definitely off with him. And Fred was no longer kidding himself that Percy's odd behavior could be blamed on a concussion. He seemed distant, much more pensive than Fred ever remembered him being… not that Percy had ever been much of a chatterbox. But the weirdest thing was that Percy would not stop staring at Fred.

Fred knew that Percy had been pretending not to do it, that he had been looking away the second Fred had noticed his brother staring at him – but the fact remained that Percy couldn't keep himself from looking at Fred as though he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing, looking at him as though afraid that he would evaporate if he blinked. A small shiver ran down Fred's spine as he remembered the sensation of cheating death he had felt at the end of the battle. All day he had been trying to ignore the feeling that he wasn't supposed to be here with the rest of them. Could Percy sense that too? Did he somehow realize that Fred wasn't supposed to be here, enjoying a glass of firewhiskey in the Leaky Cauldron with his brothers? Fred shook his head, taking another huge swallow of firewhiskey. Perhaps he was only thinking those things because he was drunk. Or could it possibly be fate's way of telling him how things were supposed to be? Fred wasn't a big believer in fate, but it could exist… right?

"Here's to Harry Potter!" Charlie shouted; his second-oldest brother had always been the heaviest drinker of the Weasley boys, and he had been making increasingly extravagant toasts to things all night. "Without whom we would have no occasion to bet bloody smashed!"

"Since when have you needed an excuse?" joked Bill good-naturedly. Fred hid his laughter in his glass of firewhiskey.

"Here's to Hermione Granger, the most beautiful creature to ever walk the face of the planet!" Ron chimed in, chugging the last of his alcohol.

"And here's to Percy," said Fred, wiping the grin off his face to raise a solemn glass to his older brother, "without whom I would not be here." The rest of his brothers echoed Fred's sentiment, sobering enough to recognize the seriousness of Fred's toast.

Percy, however, didn't seem to hear what Fred had just said about him. His mouth was slightly open, his eyes unfocused; he didn't seem to be all there, or paying the least bit of attention to what Fred had just said about him. There was a troubled look on his face that had certainly not been there earlier in the day, and Fred felt a sudden surge of worry seize him.

"Percy?" Bill asked sharply, shaking his younger brother's shoulder. "What's up? Are you okay?"

Percy snapped out of it long enough to look dazedly at Bill. "Peachy," he said vaguely, shooting an unfathomable look at Fred. Was that a flicker of fear in his eyes? "I'll be right back," he said, abruptly standing up and striding away quickly from the table, as though in a hurry to get somewhere.

"Perce?" Fred stood up and tried to follow his brother. "Where are you-" But no sooner had he opened the door to Diagon Alley than he realized Percy had disappeared.

"Fred?" asked Ron, Bill right behind him. "What's going on with Percy? Where is he?"

"Dunno," said Fred dazedly. "He ran off into Diagon Alley… I didn't get a chance to see where he went." Bill frowned and pulled out his wand to tap the bricks and open the passageway – but as soon as the archway had opened it was clear that Percy had been in a hurry to get somewhere; he was nowhere in sight.

"Percy!" Charlie bellowed, having followed his brothers out of the pub. "Where are you?"

The four of them looked around frantically for a glimpse of red hair and horn-rimmed glasses, but Percy had simply vanished into the crowd meandering through the magical shopping center. Then –

"Mr. Weasley!" All of them turned at the sound of their last name, but Fred recognized the person calling them immediately. It was Verity, the girl who had worked at the shop a few summers ago. Fred smiled at the sight of her at first, but then froze at the look of terror written all over her face.

"Mr. Weasley," she panted, skidding to a halt in front of Fred. "Mr. Weasley- come quick- I don't know how it happened, I was just walking by, and…" She paused, looking around at the other Weasley boys. "Where's the other Mr. Weasley?" she asked, her eyes wide with concern and fear.

"At the shop," Fred said slowly, trying to understand what was wrong. "Why do you – "

He froze suddenly as he caught a whiff of smoke trailing through the air. His feet seemed to be working faster than his brain as he began to sprint toward the joke shop at the other end of Diagon Alley, along the same familiar route he traveled nearly every day –

"Fred!" He could hear Bill, Charlie, and Ron running behind him, struggling to keep up with him, but Fred was practically flying down the street… he couldn't stop, not until he was sure that George was all right…

He froze in front of the shop, trying to take in what was happening. Black smoke was pouring out of all the windows, there was a riot of orange light visible through every chink in the building, flames began to shoot through the roof as the inferno destroyed the twins' dream. Fred watched in horror, the heat from the ablaze shop making sweat run down his freckled face.

"Bloody hell!" Ron shouted as he, Bill, and Charlie caught up with Fred. "The shop's on fire!"

But only one part of all this had registered with Fred, because all he could think about was who was inside. "George!" he screamed, running for the door towards the devastation. "_GEORGE!!!!_"

No sooner had he reached the door, however, than it was blown apart from the inside, and a pair of red-haired wizards appeared inside the doorway. Percy, still panting, was supporting a coughing George as he struggled to carry his brother away from the flames. Fred ran forward to help, supporting his twin with Percy as they carried George a good distance away from the conflagration so he could breathe.

"George?" Fred asked his twin anxiously. "George? Can you hear me? George?"

George coughed violently, wiping his blackened face to try and clear the soot away from his eyes. "I think I'm all right," he said shakily, feeling all over his body to check for burns. "Percy got me out of there in the nick of time, I think."

"Well, well!" Fred turned to Percy to tease him. "You know, Percy, we'd take you back even if you didn't keep saving all our lives! We do love you more than _that,_ you know!"

Percy smiled half-heartedly, but shoved his hands into the pockets of his robes. "I know," he said softly. "It's just… I was in the right place at the right time, I guess."

A squad of wizards had arrived on the scene to put out the fire. Bill, Charlie, and Ron came hurrying over to check on George.

"George, what happened?" Charlie cried, looking terrified.

"It was the fireworks," George said weakly, still rubbing his face. "One of them went haywire and caused a chain reaction… set them all off… they set our work table on fire, and it just kept spreading really fast." Fred tried to imagine what George had gone through: their life's work going up in smoke right before his eyes. He shuddered as the images flashed before his eyes.

"You've got to be kidding me!" said Percy sharply and abruptly. _"Another_ fireworks mishap?! We can't trust you with those things anymore, can we?"

"What are you talking about?" said Fred harshly. "This is the first 'fireworks mishap' we've had in years!"

Percy paused, his mouth open, then said subduedly, "You're right, of course. Silly me." He looked at his shoes, obviously deep in thought. His eyes were troubled, and he looked almost as confused as Fred felt.

Fred looked at Percy, trying to understand what exactly had brought him there in the first place. How had he known that the shop was on fire? It was the same sort of odd coincidence that had saved Fred's life in the battle the night before: Percy had dived to pull Fred aside from the falling rubble at precisely the right moment, before anyone else had even realized what was happening. The whole thing had been very fishy, and Fred still wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Now, it seemed, the same sort of thing had happened again.

"Are you sure you're all right?" Bill asked George in a low voice.

"I'm pretty sure," George told all of them; his voice had gotten stronger, though still husky from the smoke. "I don't think I got burned at all… pretty lucky, eh?"

"Lucky Percy was there to get you out," Ron said seriously. "He's on quite a rescuing streak, isn't he? First Fred, now you…" Ron paused, struggling to fit words to his emotions. "Percy, you're all right," he finally concluded. "I think you're a Gryffindor after all." Percy smiled modestly for all of half a second before returning to his troubled look.

Fred frowned, trying to make sense of what had happened. The fire in the shop had been an accident, and any of the damage could be repaired magically; he wasn't too worried about that. No, what worried him was the way Percy had been acting recently. Something was wrong with Percy, and Fred was going to find out what it was.


	4. Chapter 4

It hadn't happened before.

That was the only thing running through Percy's dazed brain as he sat in the living room at the Burrow after the fire, while their mother was bustling around George, fussing over him and making him drink some tea, and everyone else was busy discussing the incident around him. The fire, George almost dying… that hadn't happened last time.

Percy ran his hands through his hair in agitation. What had changed that would make Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes almost burn to the ground? George knew his way around explosives… when he was sober, anyway, Percy reflected, smiling ruefully. There was no way he would have messed up making the new fireworks that would have caused such a dangerous accident. Everything was the same as it had been the first time –

No, Percy corrected himself. Only one thing had changed: Fred was still alive. And that had really made all the difference. When Fred had died in the battle, it wouldn't have crossed any of their minds to spend the night celebrating Voldemort's death, because they had all been too busy mourning Fred's. And there was no way George would have even considered going into the shop to make more fireworks to sell, because ever since the night of Fred's death he had been in mourning, too depressed to leave his room. For the millionth time that day, he looked over at Fred, laughing with George over something. Was the fact that Fred was still alive responsible for all the trouble that had happened that night?

Percy chuckled to himself: he was being ridiculous. How could Fred's survival be anything but a blessing? There was no way preventing his death had caused any sort of misfortune. It was all a strange set of coincidences. It had to be.

And then there was the whole matter of how he had known about the fire. This, perhaps more than anything else, was what was troubling Percy. He had no idea how or why this was happening to him… but Percy had the strong sense that the accident at Fred's funeral had given him some sort of ability to see the future. While sitting in the Leaky Cauldron, Percy had seen the same sort of flashes that he had experienced in the battle: dislocated images that he had to piece together to realize what was happening. A box of Puking Pastilles on fire… smoke pouring out of the shop windows… and –

But Percy stopped himself from completing that thought. He had saved George, and therefore avoided another horrible tragedy. He should be grateful that these flashes – however they had happened to him – had enabled him to stop that horrible thing from happening. He had saved a life that night. He should be happy that his family didn't have to endure another funeral.

So why was he so worried that they weren't out of the woods yet?

"Percy?" Percy looked up to see the twins standing in front of him, Fred clutching something behind his back. "Would you mind coming with us into our room?" George continued.

"Um," said Percy uncertainly; Fred's eyes were alight, though not with mischief as they normally were. Percy could tell that Fred had something planned for him, and he was quite sure that it wasn't a new prank. "All right, then," he finished, getting up to follow the twins up the stairs to their room.

"We cleaned up just for you," Fred told Percy as he pushed the door to their room open. There were mounds of clothes all over the floor, a mountain of old sweets wrappers, and loosely stacked crates of new merchandise for the shop. Percy stared at Fred.

"_This_ is clean?" he said disdainfully.

"It is for us!" George told him defensively. "Anyway… I wanted to give you a sort of thank-you present for saving my life. Fred, if you will?"

With a flourish, Fred pulled out a bottle of Ogden's Old Firewhiskey. Percy's eyes widened.

"Where did you get that?" he asked in a reverent whisper. "That stuff's supposed to be the best… it must have cost a fortune!"

"Well, only the best for my brother," said George, shrugging and grinning.

Percy paused for a moment, letting the words sink in – then burst out laughing.

"I didn't think it was that funny," Fred murmured to George reassuringly, but Percy only laughed harder. Of course the twins wouldn't see the hilarious irony in this situation. Because how could they know that George had said those same words at Fred's funeral?

"Well, if you don't want it, I'll just take it back," said George doubtfully.

Percy stopped for breath, wiping the tears from his eyes. "No, thank you, really," he said, seeing that he had hurt George's feelings by rejecting his gift. "I'm glad you got it for me. Though it really wasn't necessary," he added modestly. "I'm sure you would have done the same thing for me."

Fred looked like he was about to say something in reply, but George stopped him by shoving a glass of the firewhiskey into his hands. "Drink up," he told Percy, handing him the bottle after pouring himself a generous measure into his own glass.

Percy was hesitant… surely the twins had done something vile to the bottle, as they were prone to do with any sort of food? But Fred and George were drinking without anything happening to them. Percy smiled and took an enormous swig of the firewhiskey, having barely touched his glass at the Leaky Cauldron and being in desperate need of a stiff drink.

The next thing Percy knew, the bottle was practically empty. George had passed out on his bed, having stolen quite a bit out of the bottle, and Fred was singing "Odo the Hero" to himself, trying to get Percy to sing with him. It was only because he was so inebriated that Percy happily joined in.

_And __Odo__ the hero, they bore him back home_

_To the place that he'd known as a lad, _they sang together,

_They laid him to rest with his hat inside out,_

_And his wand snapped in two, which was sad._

Percy swayed on the edge of Fred's bed, tears springing to his eyes; he recalled how George had sung that same song while drinking at the beginning of Fred's funeral, and how everyone had burst into tears as they all realized how apropos the song had been to the situation. Percy remembered thinking stupidly that the song should have been called "Fred the Hero," as the entire song had fit Fred's life and death perfectly.

"What's wrong with you?" Fred asked Percy, noting the tears.

"Isn't that the question of the century," Percy muttered, thinking of his newly-found ability to predict the future… if that wasn't all in his head too. He had been wondering vaguely whether or not this was some sort of crazy dream he was having, since he had, after all, hit his head on Fred's tombstone.

Fred laughed. "Was that a self-burn, Percy?"

"Sure," he responded vaguely, taking another drink; hardly anything was left in the bottle of firewhiskey now.

Fred chuckled again. "Hey Percy, mind if I ask you something?"

"Anything, brother," Percy replied, smiling at Fred in his alcoholic haze.

Fred's eyes were intense; Percy had the sudden feeling that Fred was trying to X-ray him, scrutinizing him in order to get answers out of him. "How'd you know the shop was on fire?"

The smile faded off Percy's face as he noticed how serious Fred had suddenly become. It suddenly dawned on him that this had all been a setup: Fred had been trying to get Percy drunk in order to get information out of him. He thought ruefully that he should have known his odd behavior wouldn't escape Fred's notice, but he had hoped that it wouldn't happen so soon.

"How did you know the shop was on fire?" Fred repeated more urgently.

Percy pasted a vague smile on his face, trying in vain to deflect Fred's completely founded suspicions. "I could smell the smoke," he tried evasively.

"From inside the Leaky Cauldron?" Fred was incredulous. "You were nearly a mile away from the shop."

"Well, I guess I've just got a stronger sense of smell than you do," Percy told him. His hands were starting to shake; he didn't want to tell anyone about what was happening to him, least of all Fred. He took one last swig of firewhiskey, emptying the bottle. "This was fun, but I think I'm going to go to bed now," he said, getting up and starting to walk away.

"You know something!" Fred said desperately, getting Percy to freeze in the doorway. He got up and strode across the room towards his older brother. "You… you know when things are going to happen!" He paused for effect, his eyes widening. "You can see the future, can't you?" he asked in a whisper.

"That's crazy!" Percy tried to tell him. "I'm no Seer, I was lousy at Divination… how could I possibly see the future?"

"I don't know, but you can. That's why you were acting so weird during the battle, wasn't it?"

"No," Percy was saying before he could stop himself. "I was just remembering how the battle was last time…" He trailed off, shocked at the words coming out of his mouth. No one was supposed to know about that! They'd all think he was crazy! He froze, staring down at the bottle of Firewhiskey. "What did you do to this stuff?" he asked Fred in a daze.

"It's spiked with Veritaserum," said Fred promptly. "It didn't start working until you drank the last drop, though. And you weren't supposed to know about that," he added as an afterthought, suddenly realizing that he had given himself away. "But I did drink it too, so I guess I brought that on myself, didn't I?" He laughed weakly before returning to business. "What do you mean, last time?"

Percy hesitated as long as the Veritaserum would let him before replying, "I think… I think I've traveled back in time. I knew what was supposed to happen in the battle because I'd already been through it once, so-"

"-So that's how you knew about the wall," mused Fred, almost to himself. He turned sharply back to Percy. "How did it happen? A Time-Turner?"

"No," replied Percy. "I- I hit my head, and next thing I knew I woke up on the floor of the Room of Requirement…"

"Hit it? On what?"

"…A tombstone," Percy replied evasively.

"Tombstone? Wait, when did this happen? Years in the future, right?"

"No…" Percy took a deep breath before answering. "It happened on May 26, 1998. One week from today."

Fred's eyes were wide as he tried to process this new bit of information. Percy would be visiting a graveyard in a week? It instantly dawned on Fred: someone was supposed to die soon, and judging from the accident that had happened today, it must be George.

"So, because you know what to expect, you know how to avoid it?" he asked slowly, struggling to understand. "So today… today, you remembered what was going to happen to the shop, so you ran to save George?"

_"I wasn't saving George!"_ Percy cried in a state of great agitation that was clearly brought on by the alcohol, exhaustion, and the stress of the things that had happened that day. Fred froze, his mouth falling open.

"What do you mean, you didn't save George?" he finally asked Percy, completely nonplussed. "You pulled him out of a burning building, didn't you?"

"I wasn't saving George," Percy repeated reluctantly. "I was saving _you._"

Silence fell between the two of them.

"You were saving _me_?" Fred asked incredulously, not tearing his eyes from Percy's face. Percy gulped and nodded, a single tear running down his face. "How?"

"Tonight… Verity came to find you in the Leaky Cauldron and told you the shop was on fire, and then you… then you ran off to see if George was all right. And you tried to save him, but…" Percy paused to take a single shuddering breath, obviously forcing himself to keep going. "You were killed in the fire."

"No I wasn't," Fred tried to say. "I'm here, I'm fine…"

"That's because I went in to get George so you wouldn't have to!" Percy ran his hands through his hair, completely frantic. "George was never in any danger, it was _you,_ don't you see?"

"So… so that tombstone you hit your head on… it was _mine_?" Percy nodded again.

"Only…" Percy sighed, tears now openly running down his face. "Only last time, there never was a fire. You were… there was…" Percy didn't seem able to bring himself to say what he needed to.

"I was killed in the battle, wasn't I?" Fred thought this whole discussion seemed rather morbid, though things were slowly starting to make sense to him. "But wait… if there was no fire last time, how did you know about it tonight?"

"I saw these sort of… _flashes,_" Percy tried to explain. "Just images of things that I guessed meant there was going to be a fire…" He shook his head as though trying to rid his mind of the pictures he had seen. "But that's not really important anymore."

"What do you mean, 'not important'?" Fred felt shock and horror flooding his body as he tried to process what Percy was trying to tell him. "If you're seeing visions of my- my death…" He paused, trying to voice his opinion. "Don't you think that means… we can't avoid it? Like it's… _fate_ or something?"

"There's no such thing as fate!" Percy's tear-filled eyes were wide with alarm. "And of _course_ we can avoid it! I saved you twice already, didn't I?"

"But-"

"I'm not losing you again," said Percy seriously. "I won't let you die again. Not this time. I can't… I can't bear it…" His voice broke, and tears began flooding down his face once more. Fred walked over to try and comfort him, but Percy suddenly jerked his head up.

"You're going to be fine, brother," he promised before leaving Fred to his very confused thoughts.


	5. Chapter 5

George woke up the next morning with a splitting headache. He groaned and rubbed his temples; he wouldn't be drinking that much again for a while. He turned to look at his twin, who was sitting in his bed on top of the covers, still fully dressed and clutching his knees tightly.

"You okay?" he asked Fred with concern.

Fred didn't respond. There were dark circles under his eyes and his mouth was clamped shut, as though afraid of saying anything. The fact was that after his conversation with Percy, he hadn't been able to sleep… though he hadn't really felt like trying to. All night he had sat awake, trying to understand what Percy had told him he had seen and why.

Fred knew that Percy wasn't crazy; his explanation for events after the battle was the only one he thought could possibly make sense. Of course it would explain why Percy had been staring at him all day yesterday, because he really had found it hard to believe Fred was still there. But it also helped put Fred's mind at ease, since he, too, had thought he was losing his mind. The simple fact was that he had been feeling out of place the day before, a sort of unexplained uneasiness in the pit of his stomach that he was intruding on something he was never meant to see. That feeling hadn't started until Percy had pulled him out of the way of that falling wall during the battle. _Was that how I was supposed to die?_ Fred wondered morbidly. _Just be crushed to death by a pile of falling stones? That's hardly an exciting way to go!_

And the fire the day before… According to Percy, he hadn't expected it to happen, though he _had_ seen it coming thanks to those "flashes" he said he was getting. If Percy was a mere time traveler, then why were these flashes happening? It was possible that the only reason the fire had happened was because Fred had failed to die in the battle. Could it be that the world was trying to make up for what Percy had stopped by creating more opportunities to kill Fred? And how many more of his family members would be put in danger until Fred's destiny finally caught up with him?

"Fred!" With a jolt, Fred realized that George had woken up and was trying to talk to him. "Are you feeling all right, mate?" There was real concern in George's eyes, and Fred felt a pang of guilt as he imagined how his death must have made his twin feel. He was sure that George must have been completely devastated – as he well should have been, he thought with a sort of dark humor. Close as he and George were, he should hope that his death had at least been noticed by his twin. But he knew that he shouldn't say anything to George about what Percy had told him the night before. There was no point in worrying George, because after all, Percy had said he could help Fred survive, right? As long as everything went according to Percy's plan, George and the rest of his family should have nothing to worry about.

"I'm fine," he said, plastering on a fake smile before turning his face away from his twin, to hide his worried expression. George, however, wasn't buying it.

"What's wrong with you?" He sighed, exasperated. "First Percy starts acting all weird, and now you're doing it too…"

"I said I'm fine!" Fred snapped, scowling at George. George blinked in surprise, before pulling an understanding smile onto his face.

"I think I know what this is about," he said softly. "You were afraid you'd lost me yesterday, weren't you?" He crossed the room to sit next to Fred. "Listen… there's nothing to worry about anymore, mate. Voldemort's gone, the war's over… our lives can just go back to normal now. And there's not really any serious chance of one of us dying anytime soon, you know?"

"You don't know that," Fred croaked; his voice had become hoarse after staying up all night. "You… you can't say that we're all out of danger, because we're not…" He realized suddenly that he was shaking. George must have noticed it too, because he stared at his twin, wide-eyed.

"Seriously, what's wrong, Fred?"

Fred paused a long time, trying to figure out how to voice what was wrong without making George worry that he was about to die. "George… do you believe in destiny?"

"Destiny?" George seemed taken aback. "What do you-"

"Do you think it exists, or not?" Fred interrupted. He was watching George closely to try and gauge his reaction.

"I… guess it could be," George began doubtfully. "I dunno… I never really thought about it before." He looked down at his hands, apparently deep in thought. "You… you don't think I was supposed to die, do you?"

"No," Fred said quickly, "I don't think you were supposed to die, no." He carefully tried not to emphasize the word _you,_ since Fred still had the distinct feeling that _he_, and not George, had been the one marked for death.

"Then…" George's eyes widened. "I know you said… after the battle… that maybe you weren't supposed to survive…" He scrutinized Fred closely. "You don't still think that, do you?"

Fred paused. "No," he said at last, feigning nonchalance. "Why would I?" He did his best to hide his true emotions from his face, and George apparently bought it, because he didn't pursue the subject.

"Then what's all this talk of destiny about- Oh," George suddenly grinned broadly. "I think I know what all this is about. You're trying to ask me if you and Angelina are meant to be together, aren't you?"

"I… sure," Fred finally lied. He hadn't seen Angelina since Christmas, but he was still truly in love with her and hoped to marry her someday. He just couldn't be sure that she hadn't met someone else while Fred had been in hiding after Easter. The two of them had been together since the Yule Ball in sixth year, though the war had certainly fragmented the progress of their relationship.

"Well in that case, you should go out with her today!" said George, looking relieved that they weren't talking about anything as serious as death. "You haven't seen each other in ages... Why don't you have a picnic or something with her this afternoon?"

"Hey… that's not a bad idea!" said Fred, finally letting a grin slide onto his face for the first time in hours. "I'll go send her an owl right now." He got up, his mood taking a sudden uplift at the prospect of seeing his girlfriend for the first time in months. A picnic with Angelina would surely take his mind off the notion of imminent death that had been plaguing him all night.

---

Angelina had sent back an enthusiastic reply about the planned picnic later that morning, so Fred packed a basket for the two of them full of delicious pasties that Mrs. Weasley had made for them, as well as a flagon of iced pumpkin juice and a crisp, if somewhat clichéd, red checkered blanket. Now all Fred had to do was stare out the kitchen window and wait for Angelina to Apparate into their garden, and the two could be off on their date. Fred smiled to himself, thinking about Angelina: her chocolate-brown eyes, her long braided hair that smelled like raspberries, and the perfect, merry sound of her laughter-

"Hey, Fred."

Fred reluctantly tore his eyes away from the window to look at the speaker. Percy had wandered into the kitchen, shifting his weight nervously, wringing his hands together and, once again, unable to tear his eyes from Fred's face. Fred felt a now-familiar surge of fear grip him again. _Oh no,_ Fred thought frantically. _Please… not today. Not now._

"What do you want, Percy?" he asked, half-exasperated, half-wary.

"Oh… nothing," said Percy with a sort of feigned casualness, still shuffling his feet. He stole half a glance at the packed picnic basket. "You, uh… going somewhere?"

"Yeah," said Fred, grinning. "I'm going on a picnic with Angelina this afternoon… not that it's really any of your business," he added, resenting Percy's interference in his love life. "Did you want to talk about anything? Because after what you said last night…"

"Are you sure you want to do this?" Percy interrupted; Fred blinked in surprise.

"Do what?" he asked, thrown for a loop. "Not die? Yeah, I'll admit, it sounds pretty good to me…"

Percy shook his head frantically. "No, no, no… I mean, do you want to do _this?_" He gestured to the picnic basket. Fred gaped at him, dumbstruck.

"Yes, of course I'm bloody sure I want to go on a picnic with my girlfriend!" Fred practically shouted. His blood boiled with anger. Percy was trying to ruin his first opportunity to really spend quality time with Angelina, and he felt a great rush of resentment toward his brother. Percy seemed to sense it, but that didn't stop him from pressing forward.

"I mean…" Percy paused, seemingly searching for words that wouldn't make Fred angrier than he already was. "There are so many other things you could do today. Why would you go on a picnic? You could, uh… I don't know, jump out of a plane… or do something less risky."

"Plane?" said Fred blankly, having no idea what Percy was talking about… and only having the vaguest idea of what a plane was. "And… what do you mean, 'less risky'? How could I possibly be in danger by going on a picnic?"

Percy's eyes were wide and haunted, and he was shaking slightly. "Please, Fred," he begged, "don't go. Not today. Please."

"Sorry," Fred scoffed, "but I'm the one who made the date with her, so I can hardly break it." He looked at Percy sternly. "That's not really good boyfriend behavior, now is it?" He let a mocking smile paint his lips. He turned back to the window and saw Angelina pop into view. His heart lifted at the sight of her: she was so beautiful, he had almost forgotten just how lovely she really was. She spotted him looking at her through the window and she waved happily at him, which he returned.

Percy was shaking his head frantically. "Fred- no…"

"I'm going," Fred told him with an air of finality, grabbing the picnic basket on his way out the door. "And you're not going to stop me."

"Come back!" he heard Percy shout after him as he went to greet Angelina. "You don't…" But Fred heard no more as he Disapparated away with Angelina.

---

The bright May sunlight illuminated the picturesque meadow where Fred and Angelina pitched their blanket. There wasn't a cloud in the sky, the air was perfumed with the smell of wildflowers, and Fred could hear several bluebirds chirping in the background. To complete this vision of perfection, Angelina was sitting next to him, enjoying a glass of pumpkin juice. Fred grinned at her and took a bite out of a pasty. He had been right to not listen to Percy about this. How could anything possibly go wrong on such a beautiful day? Fred shook his head as he chuckled over Percy's behavior. He may have foreseen the fire yesterday, but he had dead wrong to warn against this picnic.

"What's so funny?" Angelina asked him curiously, taking a pasty herself.

Fred shrugged and shook his head. "It's nothing," he said easily, taking a swig of pumpkin juice.

Angelina flashed her dazzling smile. "Thanks for taking me out here today, Fred," she said blissfully, observing their breathtaking surroundings. "You have no idea how long I've been longing to see you."

"You did see me," Fred told her cheekily. "I saw you at the battle two days ago, don't you remember?"

"That's not what I mean!" she replied, laughing. "I mean… like _this,_ on something vaguely resembling a date, rather than having to fight for our lives or having to cower in hiding, hoping we don't get killed…" Her voice shook, and Fred took her hand reassuringly.

"All that's over now," he soothed her. "We're not going to get killed. The danger's over, we've got nothing to worry about anymore." He smiled at her, calming her and causing her to return the smile.

"I missed you, Fred," she whispered into his ear. "All those months without seeing you… wondering where you were, and what you were doing…" She paused. "Who you were seeing…"

"I never even thought of seeing anyone but you," Fred murmured as he began to lean into a kiss…

They were interrupted by a metallic chink just behind Fred. They broke apart as they both turned to investigate; a metal pole had been driven into the ground, spoiling the pristine beauty of the field; and Fred, groaning slightly, knew at once who must have put it there.

"Percy!" he snapped exasperatedly. "What the bloody hell do you think you're doing here?"

Percy ignored Fred, adjusting the metal pole so that it was pointing straight into the cloudless sky. He peered at the top of the pole through his horn-rimmed spectacles, which was hovering almost directly over Fred's head.

"Oi _Percy!_" Fred could feel his anger rising again. "I asked you why you followed us!"

Percy whirled to glare at Fred in turn. "Well, you didn't listen when I told you not to come, so I had to take matters into my own hands! _Again!_"

"Fred?" Angelina looked bewildered. "What's he talking about?" Fred's eyes were still locked with Percy's as he struggled to understand Percy's motives this time.

"I have no idea," he finally said to her. "Well, Perce, if you're done here I suggest you clear out. I _am_ on a date, you know…"

"Oh, he can stay, that's all right!" Angelina told Fred with good grace, apparently not phased at all at the appearance of his brother on their date. "We've got some food, if you want some, Percy?"

"Don't invite him to stay!" Fred hissed at her, trying to block Percy out of the conversation even though he was only a few feet away from the pair of them. "He's spoiling the romantic ambience…"

"We can get rid of him soon enough," Angelina hissed back. "And it's rude to blow him off; he is your brother, after all." She smiled invitingly at Percy, who sat down rather reluctantly.

"So, Percy," said Angelina in a too-bright voice, "how're things? I haven't seen you since you graduated Hogwarts!"

Percy, who was rather busy keeping his eyes on the skies, took an instant too long to respond to her question. "Oh… you know," he said evasively, "I've been… all right, I suppose…"

"Yeah, Percy," Fred said loudly, "what exactly were you up to when you went and abandoned our family?" He wasn't quite sure what was going on with him; only a few hours ago he had been feeling perfectly hospitable towards his brother, ready to forgive all of his past transgressions. But his intrusion on his date with Angelina, coupled with the rather annoying habit of predicting his death that Percy had developed, was starting to grate on Fred a little, even if he suspected Percy's premonitions were genuine.

A flicker of hurt appeared behind Percy's glasses, and Fred instantly regretted his harsh words. But Percy seemed to forgive Fred fairly quickly as he replied, "I wasn't doing anything worth talking about after I left you all, Fred. And you know- you _know_ how sorry I am for how I acted, so why are you…"

He broke off suddenly to look in horror at the sky. Fred followed his gaze and suddenly noticed that the sky was no longer cloudless. Unnoticed by the three of them, the sky had been darkening with rainclouds, and Fred jumped as he heard the ominous rumble of thunder.

"What…?" Angelina looked unnerved by the abrupt change in the weather. "There wasn't a cloud in the sky but a minute ago!" No sooner had the words left her mouth than fat raindrops began to fall heavily on the three of them, soaking the food and plastering Fred's vivid hair to his forehead. He sighed and rummaged in the basket.

"I brought this just in case," he said, grinning as he held an umbrella over Angelina's head. She laughed and kissed him on the cheek. Both he and Percy were getting sopping wet, but Percy hadn't seemed to notice how soaked he was getting. His eyes were fixed on the top of the pole he had stuck into the ground, and he was frozen as though waiting for something.

Then Fred heard an enormous crack, saw a blinding flash of light, and the metal pole broke in two, lying on the muddy ground, smoke trailing from one of the ends.

"Oh, my God!" Angelina cried, turning to look at the pole. "Was that lightning?!" She turned her widened eyes toward Percy. "I think your pole got struck by lightning, Percy!" Percy didn't seem to hear her this time either. His eyes were fixated on his broken lightning rod, tears mingling with the rain on his cheeks. Fred was gaping at his brother. Percy hadn't been trying to spoil his afternoon after all. He had been saving Fred's life… for the third time in as many days.

There was no sound but the pounding of the rain on Angelina's umbrella and the now-distant rumble of thunder, until Fred finally ventured to Percy:

"I guess that didn't happen last time either, huh?"


	6. Chapter 6

Percy Disapparated away from that field as fast as he could, once he was sure that Fred had gone with Angelina back to safety. He didn't really know where he was going; only that he had to get away from there as fast as possible. He was still shaking after what had happened. Fred had nearly been electrocuted; he had been _this close_ to actually getting struck by lightning. More tears ran down Percy's face as those visions flashed through his mind again. Seeing Fred die over and over again was beginning to be too much to bear. He closed his eyes and started to sob in earnest. His death had been bad enough the first time, but seeing it happen twice more… Unless these flashes stopped soon, Percy was quite sure he was going to lose his mind… if he hadn't already.

"Percy?" He opened his tearstained eyes, startled at the sound of the voice. It was Penelope. She and Percy had been in a relationship since their sixth year, though it had taken a bit of a hiatus since she had had to flee the country; Penelope was Muggleborn, and Percy had encouraged her to leave once the Muggleborn Registration Act had been put into place. Looking around, Percy saw that he had unconsciously Apparated into the hall outside her apartment building. She stood in the open doorway of her flat, looking at him with concern. "What is it, love? What's wrong?"

"Fred- Fred almost got struck by lightning today," Percy managed to stammer out.

Penelope's eyes widened with shock, and then she finally said, "I think you'd better come inside." She stood back, letting him into a small but clean living room. Though fully aware that he was soaking wet, Percy took a seat on her sofa where he covered his eyes with a still-shaking hand.

"Did you say he was almost struck by lightning?" Penelope repeated, taking a seat next to him and putting a comforting arm around him. Percy sniffled and nodded miserably.

"He was just on a picnic with Angelina… there wasn't a cloud in the sky. And then this- this thunderstorm just came out of nowhere… and a bolt of lightning came and missed him by inches. Hit my lightning rod instead…"

"Wait… you put up a lightning rod when there was no sign of rain?" Penelope leaned back slightly and stared at him. Percy could practically see the cogs working inside her head; well, he supposed, he wouldn't have been able to hide _that_ from her for long. Penny had been the Ravenclaw prefect at Hogwarts, after all; her intelligence was part of the reason Percy was so attracted to her. "I didn't know you were a Seer, Percy!"

"I'm not," he sighed as he tried to explain. "I just keep seeing flashes of Fred dying every time I close my eyes, that's all." He really didn't want to talk about this again; it had been hard enough trying to explain his visions to Fred.

"What?" Penelope gasped. "What do you mean, flashes-"

"Can we talk about something else, please?" he snapped irritably. She blinked in surprise, but didn't drop the issue.

"You've been having… _visions_ of Fred's death?" she repeated in a daze. "For how long?"

"Three days," Percy told her dully, shivering slightly from cold and dread. "A different vision every day. Yesterday it was a fire, the day of the battle it was an exploding wall… today, it was lightning." He shuddered as he recalled what he had seen in his mind's eye: lightning had struck the top of the umbrella Fred held over Angelina. Angelina had been fine, since she hadn't been touching the umbrella; Fred, however, hadn't been so lucky. Percy shuddered as that horrible image swam to the forefront of his mind again, and Penelope looked at him sympathetically.

"I'm going to make you some tea," she said soothingly as she draped a towel around his shoulders. "You're soaked through, you must be freezing."

"I'm fine, Penny," he said unconvincingly. "It's Fred who I'm worried about… he's been in so many accidents lately, and I'm…" He took a deep breath. "I'm just not sure how much longer his luck will last."

"Well, has he been lucky in avoiding these accidents?" Penelope called from the kitchen where she was filling the tea kettle. "Or has something always gotten in the way to stop him from getting hurt?"

There was a brief silence while Percy tried to work out what she meant. "I don't understand what you mean," he finally shouted back to her.

"Well," said Penelope, tapping the kettle with her wand so the water would boil, "take today, for example. You say Fred would have been struck by lightning if you hadn't stepped in and put up that lightning rod. So… have you always intervened to save him, or has he gotten out of danger's way on his own?"

Percy stopped as her words finally sunk in. She was right; the only reason Fred kept surviving was because he had stepped in to save his life. Percy had pulled Fred out of the wall's way; he had prevented him from running into the burning shop; and this morning, he had set up a fifty-foot tall lightning rod that would get struck, rather than the umbrella his brother had been holding. Penelope had a point. Fred wasn't lucky after all; he just had an overprotective psychic brother.

"Well, what would you do?" he asked defensively as Penelope came back into the room, carrying two steaming mugs of tea. "I mean… if you kept seeing someone you love die, and you knew how to prevent it… wouldn't you do something about it?"

Penelope paused, gripping her mug with both hands so tightly her knuckles were whitening. "Maybe if it only happened once," she said finally. "If I only had one vision of their death, it wouldn't be so bad, because then it's not like it was fate or anything, and it wouldn't be pointless to keep trying to save them…"

Percy scoffed. "Honestly, Penny… _fate?_ Are you seriously trying to tell me that it's Fred's destiny to die?"

Penelope frowned. "You've had three visions of him dying already, Perce. How many more is it going to take in order for you to be convinced that maybe he wasn't meant to live?"

"You're mistaking coincidences for fate!" he cried, standing up and starting to pace restlessly. "These accidents may have all happened to him one after the other, but that doesn't mean they'll keep happening! They'll stop eventually, and then Fred'll be fine…"

"But what if they don't stop?" she asked him sharply. He stopped his pacing to stare at her; her eyes were wide, but her jaw was set firmly. "Are you just going to keep following Fred around, jumping through hoops to save him from whatever misfortune is slated for him that day?" She looked at him pleadingly. "And what if one of those mishaps gets you instead?"

"Well, if it really was _fate,_" Percy scoffed, unable to keep an edge of contempt out of his voice, "then _I_ wouldn't have anything to worry about, would I?"

"You're not always going to be able to be there to save him," Penelope said firmly. Percy stared at her; she did have a point. He couldn't always be there for Fred. True, he had managed to save him three times already, but could he really keep it up if, as Penelope suggested, these accidents continued? He sat back down again and looked intently at her.

"What do you think I should do?" he asked her.

She took a long time before finally opening her mouth to speak. "I think… considering everything … maybe you should just… let these accidents happen."

Percy mouthed wordlessly at her. "What, I just let him die?" he shouted angrily after a shocked pause. "I can't do that, Penny! When he died in the war…" He paused and gulped to keep himself from crying. "It was horrible," he finally said. "George can't look in a mirror without bursting into tears; Mum can't do… _anything_ without completely breaking down; and I…" A tear leaked out of the corner of his eyes and ran down his cheek; he couldn't even vocalize how Fred's death had affected him. "I'll never forgive myself if I he dies again, Penny," he said to her as his voice broke. "You can't… you can't possibly imagine what it does to our family."

Penelope looked at Percy for a long while, her eyes full of sympathy. "I lost my mum in the war," she said, looking at her hands in her lap. "And I thought… I thought that it was the end of the world." She looked up at him, her own eyes filling. "But then you helped me realize that life goes on, no matter who we lose, and that we have to be able to pick up the pieces and move on. Some good thing comes out of every misfortune."

"And what was the good thing to happen when your mum died?" Percy couldn't keep himself from asking. Penelope froze, then responded coolly:

"I don't know yet. But everything happens for a reason, you know?" She gazed almost absentmindedly at a photo hanging on the wall of the two of them, Percy's arms wrapped around Penelope's waist, both of them laughing and clearly in love. "Destiny's waiting for all of us."

---

After dropping a distraught Angelina back off at her flat, Fred returned back to the Burrow, still shaken from his near-electrocution. Percy had been right to warn against that picnic. Why hadn't he listened to him? Percy was only trying to look out for him, after all; instead of getting angry that Percy was trying to interfere, Fred should be thanking him for saving his life. When his brother had walked into the kitchen that morning, Fred hadn't really understood what was going on; perhaps if he had, he wouldn't have gone on the picnic. But Fred knew that even if Percy had told him exactly what was going to happen, he would have gone anyway, because being with Angelina was worth it. Regardless, he decided to take Percy more seriously in the future. Because, after all, if Fred started taking Percy's advice, he had the best chance of survival.

Fred still wasn't entirely certain what to make of these accidents that kept occurring around him. The feeling that death was following him had certainly intensified since he almost got struck by lightning; because after all, that thunderbolt had come out of nowhere, hadn't it? And it had missed him by a mere chance, all because Percy had taken the liberty of erecting a fifty-foot tall lightning rod right next to him! This latest mishap had certainly seemed to rule out the idea that all these might be coincidences, and his budding notion that destiny had a role in what was happening to him increased. He desperately needed to talk about this, but George was at the shop helping repair the damage from the fire, and Percy was off doing God-knows-what.

He heard laughter behind him and turned to see Harry and Ginny looking at his drenched form with amusement. "Looks like you got caught in the rain, eh?" Harry said, grinning at him. And just then, it occurred to Fred: he should talk to Harry. Who else but the Chosen One would know all about destiny?

"Hey, Ginny?" he asked his sister. "You don't mind if I borrow Harry for a moment, do you? I need to talk to him."

"Okay," said Harry, looking slightly confused but following Fred into the living room anyway. Fred waited until they were out of Ginny's earshot before launching straight into it.

"What's your take on destiny, Harry?" he asked without preamble; if he was really slated to die like he suspected he was, he didn't have any time to beat around the bush.

"Destiny?" Harry repeated, his look of confusion deepening. "I- I don't understand. What do you mean, my _take_ on it?"

"Do you think… do you think that things happen for a reason, or is it all just random?" Fred was feeling distinctly awkward about this conversation. It was one thing to talk to George about fate, but Harry, though he had known him for years, was barely better than a stranger. To have such a serious conversation with him felt much more uncomfortable than it had with George or Percy.

Harry, though he too seemed to sense the awkwardness of the situation, gave Fred's question a large amount of thought before answering. "It's not all… _random,_ exactly, but nothing's set in stone, either," he began. "There was a prophecy that said I had to be the one to defeat Voldemort… that it was my… my _destiny_ to be a hero. But the only reason that the prophecy meant anything was because Voldemort chose to make it mean something."

"But you _are_ a hero," Fred told him, making Harry turn red and shake his head modestly. "You're always helping people; it's been more than just beating Voldemort…"

"There's a difference between destiny and disposition," Harry said seriously. "I only became what I am today because of what Voldemort did to me when I was a baby. He killed my father – making me want to get revenge. He killed my mother – giving me the power of her love that helped me defeat him. I guess I help people because... I'm just wired that way." He broke off and looked straight into Fred's eyes. "Dumbledore told me that if no one had set any store by the prophecy, then it never would have come true. It was self-fulfilling; that's all there is to it."

"So… you don't think there's such a thing as fate?"

Harry took a deep breath before answering: "No, I don't. In my case, we both could have walked away… we never had to kill each other. It was only because Voldemort chose to pursue me that our story had to end like that. He had the chance to leave me alone, and he didn't take it. So no, I'm not a big believer in destiny. Frankly, I think it's just a load of crap." He broke off and looked at Fred with suspicion. "Why do you ask?"

"Oh… no reason," Fred said with a fake sort of airiness. "It's just… that… this friend I have…"

"Right," said Harry skeptically. "Your 'friend.' Go on."

Fred gave an exasperated sigh before continuing. "Yes, my _friend_ thinks that he should have died two days ago, and that death keeps following him because it was his fate to die."

"Okay," said Harry, still looking amused by the whole "my friend" gimmick. "Well, Fred, tell your _friend_ that he doesn't have anything to worry about. It's all just a coincidence, and whatever he thinks is coming after him is just all in his head." Harry smiled at Fred reassuringly. "He's going to be fine."

"Great," said Fred dully. "Thanks." He walked away from Harry and thundered up the stairs to his and George's room, not feeling remotely reassured by their conversation. Harry may have been right about his showdown with Voldemort being a result of free will, but he was dead wrong about this. Death _was_ following him; all these consecutive catastrophes proved it. But he was sure about one thing, as he laid on his bed and listened to the rain still pounding against the roof: as long as Percy kept foreseeing the accidents and telling him how he could survive, there was a chance he could avoid his fate altogether. He was lucky he had Percy; his life was now entirely in his brother's hands. His destiny was coming to catch up with him, and the key to avoiding death was Percy.

* * *

_I'm not too sure how I feel about Harry making an appearance in this chapter, since I'm pretty sure I suck at writing him. However, the opportunity for him to make an appearance was too good to pass up. Don't expect on him being a regular feature though. And to everyone reading_ _this story, I just want to say that you make my life. You all rock my socks_! _:D_


	7. Chapter 7

_Wow, this chapter turned out really dark. Sorry. Read this chapter with the lights on, kids!_

* * *

Percy sat at the familiar wooden table in the Hogwarts library, scratching his head in confusion. How did Professor Snape expect him to write two whole rolls of parchment on Asiatic anti-venoms by Monday? Flipping through one of the dozens of books piled around him, he found a passage that was likely to be useful in his essay, and he sighed in relief. He compulsively adjusted the Head Boy badge on his black robes before dipping his quill into the ink bottle and starting on a fresh paragraph. 

No sooner had he touched the quill to the parchment, however, than he heard a faint sobbing coming from behind one of the bookshelves. He turned and laid down his quill, confused. He had a very good idea of who that was, but why were they crying? He got up to investigate behind the bookshelf, but he soon found that the aisle was empty. He ran along it, still following the sound of weeping.

"Hello?" he called. "Mum? Is that you?" He still hadn't found anyone, but he was sure it was his mother who was crying. He recognized the sound from the week after Fred's death in the Battle of Hogwarts. The sound of his mother's weeping continued, now coming from the other side of the library. Percy ran toward it once more; but when he arrived at the source, he found not his mother, but George, sitting on the floor with his back against one of the shelves, a scrap of parchment with a Tic-Tac-Toe board drawn on it lying in front of him.

"George?" said Percy, very confused. "What are you doing here? Where's Mum?"

George didn't seem to hear him. He carefully drew an X in the corner of the board, a blank, vague look in his eyes, before droning, "You were supposed to save him. You were supposed to save him, Percy. You were supposed to save him."

"Wh-what?" Percy stammered, frightened by his brother's behavior. "I- I don't understand… save who?"

George didn't reply. Instead, he turned to an empty spot next to him, telling it in the same monotonous voice, "Your move, Gred." Percy opened his mouth to try and get some answers out of George, but he was distracted by the weeping sound now echoing through the entire library. Percy ran away from his obviously delirious brother, following the sound of his mother's sobs out of the library, along the corridors, down the marble staircase… right into the Great Hall.

It was empty, save for a single coffin lying closed in the center of the floor. Percy approached it with great trepidation, feeling sure of who he was about to find inside. As he got nearer, the lid opened by itself with a bang, and Percy stared down at the one sight he had never hoped to see again.

Fred was inside.

He was exactly as Percy remembered him from the funeral: that hint of a smile he had died with still played on his chapped lips, though the rest of him didn't look like Fred at all. His mother had wanted him looking nice for his funeral as she had never been able to make him look in life: his gingery hair was neatly parted down the middle and he was wearing those same damned dress robes he had worn to Bill's wedding. Percy remembered how George had protested, saying Fred hadn't even wanted to wear those to his own wedding, let alone be buried wearing them; but their mother's sobbing pleas had finally made George give in. Percy remembered privately thinking that George had only agreed because he felt that if the corpse didn't look like the Fred they knew, they could pretend that it wasn't him. All in all, Fred looked unnaturally peaceful, too still lying in that coffin; it was so unthinkable to even imagine him lying that still forever, never moving again, and yet that abnormal sight would be the last mental image Percy would ever have of his brother.

"Fred!" Percy gasped, blinking away the tears that had appeared in his eyes as he reached for either side of his brother's cold face. "Fred! Please, wake up! This isn't supposed to happen to you! I wasn't supposed to let it!" His eyes fell on Fred's pale hands folded delicately on his stomach, clutching a gold coin Fred had often worn on a chain around his neck. Percy gently took it out of Fred's hands to get a closer look: it was the DA Galleon that had summoned him to the battle in the first place.

No sooner had he taken away the medallion, however, than Fred's eyes flew open. There was no laughter or happiness in them like there usually was: they were cold and empty and pupilless, just two glowing white orbs that sucked Percy in and held him, refusing to let him go. Fred laid his icy hands on Percy's wrists, pulling Percy closer to Fred's horrid, dead face. Percy tried to scream, but he couldn't…

"F-Fred?" was all he could stammer out as dead Fred's grip tightened around his wrists.

_"__Death is coming for me, Percy,_" Fred rasped before letting go of his wrists and closing those horrible eyes, just as Percy's flew open and he finally started screaming.

"No… no… no! No! Fred! NO!!!" Percy was yelling, thrashing wildly about to rid himself of Fred's dress robes that he had somehow gotten entangled in, Fred's sightless eyes still haunting him…

"Percy! Oi, Percy!"

Percy stopped thrashing, breathing heavily, as he slowly became more aware of where he was. He was in his room, under the covers, rather than trapped in Fred's dress robes like he had initially thought in his feverish dream state. He peered around the darkened room at the two identical blurry figures beside his bed, groping for his glasses on the bedside table.

"Bloody hell, Percy!" said the figure nearest to him, who had spoken first: it was George. "What do you think you're doing, waking up the whole house?"

"S-sorry," Percy apologized shakily. "I just… I had a nightmare, that's all."

"A nightmare?" Fred asked him sharply. "What did you see?"

Still panting and trembling from the memory of what he had seen in the dream, Percy looked carefully at Fred. Those horrible white pupilless eyes were gone, thank goodness, replaced by Fred's usual brown eyes that were currently narrowed with a calculating suspicion. Percy reached up and tentatively placed a hand on his brother's arm; Fred's skin was no longer cold as death, though he quickly yanked his arm away from Percy's reach.

"What happened?" Fred repeated more urgently.

"Nothing," Percy finally said. "It was just a dream, that's all."

"Well, in that case, we're going back to sleep," yawned George, stretching for the ceiling. "Come on, Fred," he said, making for the door.

"Coming," said Fred, obviously feigning cheerfulness for George's sake, before turning back to Percy, looking grim.

"You know, if you had one of your flashes again, you can just tell me," he said with an uncharacteristic seriousness. "I can take it, you know…"

"Well, I haven't," Percy interrupted. "But if I do, you'll be the first to know, don't worry." He smiled, trying to reassure his brother while still feeling shaken up himself. It seemed to work, however, as Fred returned the grin, bid Percy good night, and left, swinging the door shut behind him. It wasn't until then that Percy became dimly aware that he was still clutching something in his fist, and he had a very good idea of what it was. Almost afraid to find out, he slowly opened his right hand and almost started screaming again when he saw it.

He was still holding Fred's DA Galleon.

---

Percy stumbled down the stairs the next morning, half-blinded by exhaustion. He hadn't really been able to sleep since the nightmare of the previous night. Try though he had, he couldn't stop himself from reliving every horrible moment of that vivid dream: George's mutterings that Percy was supposed to save Fred; the coffin flying open to reveal Fred's body with those sightless eyes; Fred's admonition that death was coming for him. After thinking it over all night, Percy had only come to one possible conclusion from the dream: that Fred had to die. The unexplained appearance of the DA Galleon in his hand only solidified this impression in his mind: it was as though Percy really had encountered his brother in a coffin, that it had been more than just a bad dream, it had been real. Penelope had said the day before that Fred was meant to die, and that it was pointless to keep trying to save him; maybe the dream meant that what she said was true, that Fred's death was inevitable. No matter what he tried to do, Fred's life would always end early, and he would be buried looking exactly as he had in the nightmare: a twenty-year-old with an unnaturally straight part in his hair...

"Good morning, Perce," his mother said cheerfully, setting a bowl of porridge in front of him as he sat down at the kitchen table. Percy mumbled indistinctly in response. Fred came bounding down the stairs energetically, closely followed by George, as they sat themselves on either side of Percy.

"Morning, Perce!" Fred told him brightly; he looked much more animated than he had the previous day, when he had had trouble staying awake. Fred had apparently had no trouble falling asleep last night. _And why would he?_ Percy thought dully. _He doesn't have his brother's death weighing on his conscience._

"Sleep well?" Percy asked him, not really interested in the answer.

"It was excellent," Fred reported. Lowering his voice, he added in a murmur, "Thanks for what you said last night, Percy. I've… I've got to admit, this whole impending death thing had me really messed up yesterday; I didn't think I'd be able to get to sleep at all. But then I realized… I'm fine as long as you tell me what's coming, aren't I? As long as you don't get any more of those flashes, I'll be sound as a pound!"

But no sooner had the word "flashes" left Fred's mouth than Percy fell into one of his visions again. And this one was different… much clearer and less fragmented than the others had been…

_"Get another box of __Puking Pastilles__, will you, Forge?" Fred called to his twin over the heads of dozens of young customers in the shop. Grinning, George disappeared into the storeroom to get more stock for the shelves. "And __oi__, you over there!" Fred added to a customer. "__Please keep away from the Pygmy Puffs!" He ran over to the display to keep the six-year-old from injuring their merchandise. _

_No sooner had he gotten over there than the ground began shaking violently. __Fred fell to his knees, grabbing onto one of the shelves for support, just as the cobblestone street outside split in two. __Merchandise was falling off the shelves, flying toward some of the shoppers. __The customers screamed and ducked on the floor, covering their heads with their hands, the younger ones sobbing and parents crying out their children's names, trying to keep their families together in the catastrophe that had struck them-_

_"George!" Fred was yelling in the din for his twin, crawling over into the aisle containing the love potions, trying to get closer to the back room."George, are you all right? George!"_

_A violent tremor caused several bottles to fall off the shelves and __smash all around Fred. One of them struck him squarely on the back of the head and shattered, causing stars to flash in front of his eyes. Gingerly, he put a hand to where the bottle had struck him. Pulling his hand away, he saw that it was covered in a red sticky substance__ that was certainly not love potion__… Fred hit the ground before he could fully realize what had just happened to him._

_The earthquake passed as quickly as it had __begun__, and George ran out of the back room, still holding the Puking Pastilles Fred had asked for. "Fred, are you all right out here?" he called through the crowd of shaken yet relatively uninjured shoppers. "__Oi__, answer me, you-"_

_The case of Puking Pastilles hit the ground with a dull thud as George found the scene where Fred had fallen. There was broken glass everywhere, and Fred was lying __face down__ in a pool of potion mixed with blood… too much blood. "Oh no," George breathed, running over to his twin and turning him face up. "Fred! Fred, wake up! Please!" Fred opened his __fluttering eyelids, his breathing too shallow to allow him to speak… and then his eyes became empty while fixed on __his twin's__ face, __as Fred Weasley left__ the world forever._

_And as Percy saw this newest __way__ his younger brother__ would die__, the scene evaporated, and a yell brought him back to reality…_

"Percy!"

Percy opened his eyes; he hadn't realized that he had shut them in the first place. He was still sitting at the breakfast table, and no one but Fred seemed to have noticed anything was wrong.

"You had a vision again, didn't you?" he asked in a low voice so no one else could overhear their conversation; George, on Percy's other side, was deep in conversation with Ron and Charlie about Quidditch, though his brow was furrowed and he looked slightly preoccupied about something. "So… how's it happen this time?" Fred asked quietly, with a grim sort of resignation.

Percy stared at Fred for a moment, deeply torn for a moment. He had promised to warn Fred of what was coming, and he knew that he couldn't just let his brother die… and yet…

_Maybe you should just let these accidents happen._

Could he really live with himself if he just left Fred to his fate? Even after his conversation with Penelope yesterday about the inevitability of Fred's early demise, Percy still wasn't ready to give up on his brother. He was willing to delude himself that all his visions were only coincidences, if that meant Fred stood a chance of living.

_Death is coming for __me._

"I can take it, Percy; what happens?" Fred was still asking him, looking more anxious over Percy's hesitation and the way Percy was averting his eyes from Fred's. Much as he hated to believe that his little brother was doomed, and as much as he was trying to kid himself that Fred still had a chance of living a normal life, Percy knew that these accidents would continue until Fred died, and that there was nothing he could do to prevent them completely. The logical part of his brain agreed wholeheartedly with Penelope; there was just that small, emotionally driven part of him that was screaming to save Fred no matter what.

"Perce!" Fred grabbed Percy by the shoulders, forcing him to look him in the eyes. "_What's going to happen to me?_"

"Nothing!" Percy finally managed to spit out. "There's… there's just going to be an earthquake soon." He only said "soon" because he wasn't convinced it would be that day. After all, the twins had been in the shop in his vision, and the shop was still damaged from the fire, though George, Arthur, and Ron had spent all of yesterday trying to fix it back up.

Fred paused as though waiting for Percy to finish his thought, but when Percy remained silent Fred asked him, "That's it? No near-fatal accident waiting for me? No... stampeding hippogriffs I need to look out for?"

"No," Percy lied with unnerving ease. "All I saw was the earthquake…"

The visible relief this simple lie brought to his brother's face tore Percy's heart in two. Fred truly believed that he would be safe; Percy was giving him false hope. He wasn't sure why he was telling his brother that he would be all right. Maybe he was trying to believe it himself; or maybe by not telling Fred what was coming, he would be able to face his fate without fear. Fred was grinning, and nearly every trace of the worry that had plagued it for the past two days was gone.

"Brilliant," he said softly. "Thanks, Percy. I'm glad I have you to look out for me."

"If you're done jabbering over there," George leaned across Percy to tell Fred, "it's time for us to get going."

"Going?" Percy asked sharply. "Why? Going where?"

"Back to Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes, of course!" George said, turning to face Percy, fake offense written all over his face. "Weren't you listening to what I said earlier?"

"Er… no," Percy admitted; he had been a little too busy seeing Fred _die_ to hear anything anyone else might have been talking about. "But what do you mean, you're going back there? I thought the shop burned down?"

"Well, yeah, there was a fire," George said with the unnatural patience of a kindergarten teacher, "but the shop didn't burn down. Dad and Ron and I spent all of yesterday repairing the damage by magic, and now we're back in business!"

"I love magic!" Fred chimed in, a huge grin plastered on his face. "Well, let's get going then, Forge, we've got customers waiting!" And without another word, the twins got up and headed out to the front yard to Disapparate to their store. And as Percy watched Fred leave, he realized that the earthquake would happen that day, and that this might very well be the last time he ever saw his brother. He watched Fred wave goodbye to him and vanish with a pop, and Penelope's words of the previous night came back to him:

_Destiny__ is__ waiting._


	8. Chapter 8

Author's note: I know a lot of people have been comparing my story to Final Destination in reviews. Well, I'd just like to say for the record that this story is not supposed to be based on that movie, mainly because I've never seen it. Though from what I read on the 'Kipedia about it, I can definitely see the similarities. This story as a whole was actually inspired by LOST and Donnie Darko. Although mostly LOST (as _the werewolf gal_ understands XD). Anyway, I just wanted to clear that up. Now on with the chapter!

* * *

The newly restored Weasleys' Wizard Wheezes was full of chattering customers, all buying as many prank items as they could possibly carry. The downfall of Voldemort had brought about a sort of manic euphoria in the Wizarding community, and the people's good moods were obvious from a mile away. 

Fred couldn't understand it.

He watched the happy, laughing young witches and wizards around him, feeling strangely detached from all of them. It was so bizarre that he, the master prankster, the most jovial of all the Weasleys, suddenly couldn't find anything to laugh about. And what's more, he would have thought that he would be able to enjoy today, the first day since the end of the war that Percy hadn't had any premonition of his death.

And yet… Fred couldn't find it in himself to be remotely happy. Even if nothing was going to happen today, he knew death would catch up to him eventually. It had been following him ever since the battle… when Percy had pulled him out of the way of that wall that was supposed to end his life. What's more, he wasn't sure Percy had done him any favors by helping him to cheat death. Since that night, Fred had had the growing sensation that he was living someone else's life – no, that wasn't quite it. Simply by living, he was having something he wasn't supposed to, and that made him incredibly uneasy. Sitting at the table and eating meals with his family, working at the shop… even _breathing_… none of it was supposed to happen to him anymore. And he knew it. Since the battle, Fred had been an outsider in his own life, and he couldn't stand it much longer.

"Fred?" George came over to mutter in his ear. "Are you all right? You've been really off lately…"

Fred forced a smile on his face that he knew wouldn't convince his twin. "Of course I'm all right," he said, giving a halfhearted chuckle. "Just a little tired, is all…"

"You told Percy you slept fine," said George suspiciously. Fred groaned inwardly; he knew that he and George were too close for him to be convinced by a lie as transparent as the one he had just told. "Plus you've been like this ever since the night of the Battle of Hogwarts…" He broke off, looking concerned. "What's wrong?" he pleaded. "Whatever it is, I can help you-"

"You can't," Fred interrupted harshly. "You can't help me. No one can…" He trailed off, fighting back the tears that had appeared in his eyes. It was not an easy thing, after all, to admit your own mortality. And Fred had known for three days now that he was marked for death… that perhaps he had been for his entire life and hadn't realized it. George set his jaw, looking frustrated.

"Oh, but Percy can help you?" he said heatedly. "I can't believe you're keeping secrets from _me,_ your _twin,_ and telling them to Percy, that bastard who left us for three years! You're letting him in on-"

"Actually, I'm not," Fred said coldly. "He won't leave me alone… he won't accept what has to happen." George's eyes widened in shock at Fred's last statement, and he opened his mouth to reply; but before he could say anything, a young boy said from somewhere around their waists, "Hey misters, can I have one of those blue furballs?"

They both looked down at a young boy of around six years old, looking up at them with an expectant look on his cherubic face. Fred froze, staring at him. He wasn't sure why, but he got a very ominous feeling from this kid… as though something was about to happen because of him…

"Will!" a young woman shouted, running over to the little boy. "I told you, I'm not getting you a pet!"

"But _wh__y not?_" Will whined.

"Because if I do, I'll be the one who has to take care of it," the woman muttered. "I'll get you some sparklers, if you want!" The boy scowled and turned away. The girl turned to Fred and George apologetically.

"Sorry about my brother," she said to them. "I know he can be a little… exuberant sometimes." She smiled at Fred, who returned her gaze passively. At the moment, he didn't feel motivated to pretend to be the happy-go-lucky proprietor of a joke shop just for one little customer.

"It's all right," George told her, with an admonishing look at Fred that clearly said: _You're hurting our business with all your negativity._ "Is there anything else I can get for you?"

As George handled the customer, Fred went off to make sure the shelves were stocked, mainly because he had nothing better to do and really didn't want to talk to any of the customers. He just couldn't relate to any of them today, and he wasn't entirely convinced he would be able to ever again. Looking at the stock of Skiving Snackboxes, he noted that they were running low on Puking Pastilles.

"All right, ma'am, let me go back and get you your Canary Creams," George told his customer, making for the back room.

"Get another crate of Puking Pastilles too, will you, Forge?" Fred hollered over to his twin. He suddenly noticed the young boy from before reaching his little hands through the bars of the Pygmy Puffs cage, his chubby fingers wrapped too tightly around a bright blue one. Fred sighed and ran to do some damage control. "Oi, you over there!" he called to the boy, running over to him. "Please keep away from the Pygmy Puffs!" As Fred approached, the little boy pulled his hand out of the cage guiltily and ran away to his sister.

Just then, the ground began to shake violently; the windows were rattling, Fred's brain was surely bouncing around inside his skull… With horror, Fred recalled Percy's vision of that morning. _There's going to be an earthquake…_ Fred wasn't too worried about himself. After all, Percy had said he would be all right, and he was sure that Percy would tell him if he was in danger of dying, after what had happened over the past few days. But George was stuck in the back room, with those unsteady towers of dangerous joke items that would surely topple over on top of him… With a growing sense of dread, Fred began to run back to his twin.

"George!" he cried, running toward the love potion aisle, which would be the nearest route to the storeroom. "George, are you all right? George!"

But before he could even run through the aisle, someone grabbed his arm and yanked him backward, pulling him down on his hands and knees. "Get down!" Percy cried, still holding Fred's wrist firmly. Fred gaped at him, speechless for once; but for the moment he did as he was told, holding his arms over his head. He was bewildered by Percy's behavior. What had made him come here, at precisely the moment the earthquake struck? He could only come up with one explanation…

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the earthquake stopped. The customers got to their feet shakily, murmuring to each other, shaken by what had just happened. Fred noted that the Pygmy Puff boy was all right, having found his sister, though he was sporting a handsome purple bruise on his forehead. Fred got to his feet as well, glowering at his older brother suspiciously.

"You all right?" Percy asked him, panting as though he had just run a great distance. Fred nodded mutely, still scowling at Percy. But before he could say anything else, he heard George calling for him in the crowd.

"Fred, are you all right out here?" George was hollering from near the love potion aisle. "Oi, answer me, you great git!"

Without taking his eyes from Percy's sweaty face, Fred lifted his voice and said, "I'm fine, George. Are you okay?"

"Yeah," George responded, catching up to his brothers. He did a slight double take as he saw Percy. "Blimey, what are you doing here, Perce? I thought you'd be at the office today!"

"Change of plans," Percy said vaguely, still trying to catch his breath. Fred took Percy's exhaustion as an opportunity to confront him.

"Hey Percy, can I talk to you for a moment?" He shot half a nervous glance at George; he was about 95 percent certain that George had a very good idea of what was going on, but he didn't want to give him any more reason to worry about him "In private?" he added, pulling Percy through the aisle filled with broken glass and spilled potion into the back room, closing the door behind them. Percy looked extremely wary, though he remained silent.

"Why are you here?" Fred asked him, cutting to the chase. He seemed to be doing that a lot lately, he reflected sardonically.

Percy avoided Fred's eyes as he said, "I just thought I'd stop in and surprise you guys today…"

"Stop it," Fred told him sharply. "I'm not stupid, you know. I know you saw the earthquake in your vision this morning. What I want to know is," he lowered his voice unnecessarily, "how did you know not to let me go through that aisle?"

"I didn't," Percy tried after a long pause. "I just wanted to keep you out of the way where things might fall on you…"

"Don't lie to me!" Fred shouted. "You saw my death again, didn't you?" Percy said nothing. "_Didn't you?" _he said more intently.

Percy froze for a long time before answering in a low voice, "How dumb can you be, running through somewhere where broken glass is flying everywhere? If you had been thinking rationally, you wouldn't have done it, and then I wouldn't have had to save your life…"

"I thought George was in danger!" he yelled angrily. "And you said I was safe, so I thought…" He shook himself mentally, getting back on task. "But you could have been close by far more easily for this one," he mused, thinking about the way Percy had just suddenly appeared. "You could have offered to come into the shop with us today or something, just to make sure you could save me when this happened…" Percy was still avoiding his eyes. "_Look at me!"_ Reluctantly, Percy's swimming eyes met Fred's narrow, suspicious ones.

"You're right," Percy finally choked out. "I could have… but my coming here was sort of last minute." He gestured vaguely to his sweaty brow, and Fred recalled how he had been panting: he had obviously made a snap decision to run to the shop. "The earthquake just started when I was sitting at Florean's, trying to figure things out, and I sprinted here."

"Why?" Fred's voice was barely more than a whisper now. "Why sprint here, when you could have been at the shop all along?"

"Because…" Percy gulped. "Because I wasn't sure if I _should_ save you!"

A long silence followed his words, during which Fred digested this new information and absorbing the shock it had created.

"You would have just let me die?" he murmured to his big brother: his protector, someone he had reluctantly looked up to all his life, the one who was supposed to be looking out for him. Percy nodded miserably – and then Fred tackled him to the ground.

_"Why didn't you?"_ he roared, delivering blow after blow to Percy's face. Blood flowed from both his brother's nostrils, Percy's mouth was filling with blood… and yet Fred couldn't stop hitting him. _"Why didn't you? Why didn't you just let me die, Percy?"_

"Have – you – gone – mental?" Percy spat out between blows, blood covering the entire lower half of his face; he was making no effort to defend himself. But Fred wasn't paying any attention to Percy. He was thinking about the way he had felt since the battle: like a silent observer in his own life, powerless to control what would happen to him and unable to enjoy time with the people he loved, being increasingly detached from them and unable to understand them. He didn't blame Percy for the way he was feeling exactly; his escapes from death were responsible for these sensations, though Percy was responsible for Fred avoiding fate. He was so overwhelmed by his emotions that he abruptly stopped hitting Percy, slumped on the floor, and started sobbing for the first time since he was six years old.

"Fred… it's okay," Percy said thickly, wiping some of the blood off his face and placing an understanding arm on his brother's shoulder, apparently having already forgiven the beating he had just received. "I'll do better next time, I'll… I'll save you earlier then…"

"You can't change it, Perce," Fred choked out between his sobs, his shoulders heaving. "You can't change it no matter what you try to do… there's no way you can save me."

"That's not true!" Percy gasped. "What do you call what I just did back there?"

"Well, yeah, you've _tried,_" Fred told him angrily. "But it hasn't made one whit of difference, has it? You've tried to save me four times now, but things are just going to keep going wrong until I finally snuff it…"

"You can't die," Percy told him firmly, fighting back tears himself now. "You're my little brother, and I love you… how can you expect me to just sit back and let you die?"

"You're going to have to," Fred told him, wiping away his own tears and looking Percy straight in the eyes. "I was meant to die in that battle, and you saving me… It was good-intentioned, I'm sure, but it doesn't change the fact that death is coming for me." He saw Percy shudder, but he didn't stop to ask why. "And you can do anything you want to stop accidents you see coming, but… but the universe has an unfortunate pattern of course-correcting, and everything's just going to keep going mad until my fate catches up with me."

Percy shook his head, as though trying to deny what Fred was trying to tell him. "I made a mistake today, trying to leave you to your 'fate'," he said firmly. "It won't happen again, I promise."

"You're not listening to me!" Fred told him harshly. "Look, I'm trying to tell you… it doesn't matter what you try to do…" He suddenly realized he was shaking, yet he forced himself to keep looking at Percy as he spoke the truth neither of them wanted to face:

"I'm going to die, Percy."


	9. Chapter 9

Sorry about the long wait... first of all, I had writer's block; and I also was busy having a life for the first time in four months! Anyway, here's the long-awaited chapter the ninth!

* * *

George was fuming as he watched as Fred tugged on the sleeve of Percy's robes, walking for the back room where they could, once again, have a private conversation without him. Fred and George _were_ twins, after all; their lives were inextricably intertwined, and if something was going to happen to Fred, then George would be the one who would feel the effects hardest. Any discussion involving Fred should automatically include George too; they shouldn't try to hide the truth from him. The door clicked shut behind them, and George crept over to the doorway that led to the back room, determined to find out what was going on even if it meant overhearing something he wasn't supposed to. 

"Excuse me, are those for me?"

George looked up, startled to see the customer he had helped earlier looking at him expectantly. "The Canary Creams," she clarified, gesturing to the box George hadn't even noticed he was still holding. He had almost forgotten he had gone back to get them for her when the earthquake had struck.

"Er… right," he muttered. "That's two Galleons, then…" He held out his hand for the money, but she hesitated.

"Um… I hope you don't think me forward, but I'd really like to get to know you better," she said in a rush, her face reddening furiously. "Maybe sometime we could… grab a coffee or something?"

George considered her for a moment: she was still slightly red with embarrassment, but she looked hopeful that he would say yes. George was surprised that she was asking him to go out with her, since during his days in Hogwarts girls had always been far more likely to go for Fred over him. He had had a brief fling with Katie Bell for a while, but it hadn't lasted; he had almost gotten used to the idea of perpetual bachelorhood, and now this girl he didn't even know was asking him out. He was on the brink of rejecting her, wanting to listen in on Fred and Percy's conversation… and yet there was something in her eyes that stopped him from telling her no outright. He was just about to tell her that they could discuss a date later – then he heard something from inside the storeroom that made his blood run cold.

_"__Why didn't you just let me die, Percy__?!?"_

George froze; that was Fred's voice, and he sounded completely irate… and panicky… and, most troublingly, full of despair. He had never heard his twin sound quite like that. Fred had always been the one quicker with the jokes, the one causing laughter in their house and in their world; he had gotten upset plenty of times, but he had never once sounded like this, not even when the Death Eaters had forced them from their home or when one of their family members had been close to dying. Hearing him sounding so miserable was almost more than George could bear, and he had no idea what to make of Fred's new state.

"Um… Mr. Weasley?" the young woman tried tentatively. "Did you… did you hear me?"

He forced himself to look at her. She could wait; the shop could wait; right now, his world was threatening to crash about his ears – ear – and he had to focus on Fred.

"Sorry," he told her, struggling to keep his voice calm. "We're closing… you have to leave."

"What?" Her brown eyes filled with hurt; she evidently thought she was being rejected. But George didn't have any time to explain to her… and anyway, what sort of explanation did he owe her, a complete stranger?

"We're closed!" he repeated, raising his voice so the other customers could hear him. "Everybody out!" All the customers filed out slowly, the last being George's rejected suitor and her little brother, who was still squawking, "But Meg, I want it! I want a Pygmy Puff!" She took no notice of him, only yanked on his pudgy little hand to get him to leave faster, an upset look on her face.

As soon as he was sure they had all left, George magically locked the shop door, then flung the box of Canary Creams against the wall in a fit of anger. The muffled sounds of conversation were still coming from inside the storeroom, but George had lost any desire to overhear what they were talking about. He was still trying to process Fred's words… _Why didn't you just let me die, Percy?_ he had screamed. What did he mean? Did Fred _want_ to die? And what did he mean by Percy letting him die? Percy, it seemed, had done something to save Fred's life during the earthquake… but why wasn't Fred more grateful?

Unbidden, George recalled Fred's words from the night of the battle. _I almost died… and I can't help but feel like maybe I was supposed to._ But that was absurd. What had Fred ever done to deserve dying prematurely? And anyway, Fred hadn't been in any danger since the night of the battle. George had been in far more than he had: after all, George had been the one in the fire the night after the battle, whereas Fred had been perfectly safe then (as far as George knew, he reflected grimly; would Fred have even bothered to tell him if he had been in any more near-accidents?). But then he remembered sharing Fred's feeling that death was supposed to come for him that night… the sensation he had had watching Fred run away from him and feeling like they'd never see each other again… could it really be that they hadn't been supposed to see each other after that moment? Was Fred really supposed to have been dead for the last three days?

George's musings were interrupted by the door swinging open, Fred and a bloodied Percy walking out.

"You're wrong, you know," Percy told Fred, wiping the blood from his face with a formerly spotless handkerchief. George could tell that they were trying to keep this portion of their conversation ambiguous, for his sake, and he wanted to scream with irritation.

Fred simply stared at Percy for a long moment before telling him, "You and I both know, Perce, that I'm not." Without another word, Percy Disapparated, leaving the twins alone together. For the first time in twenty years, there was a long, awkward silence between them, while Fred avoided George's eyes and George tried to figure out how best to confront his twin and demand answers.

"What happened to Percy?" he finally said, trying to make it sound as though he were only mildly curious.

"Being a stubborn git as always," Fred muttered, taking a look around the shop. "Where are all the customers, anyway?" he asked, also obviously trying to keep conversation far away from the subject he had been discussing with Percy.

"Sent them away," George told him indifferently. "We need to talk."

Fred looked up sharply, fear glinting in his eyes. George could tell that Fred had never planned on discussing with him what he couldn't stop talking about with Percy, and he felt another spasm of anger grip him.

"We'll talk later," Fred said after a lengthy pause. "We've got to clear up first…" He made a sweeping gesture toward the mess the earthquake had caused. Boxes of every sort of product littered the filthy floor, the aisle with the love potions was full of spilled potion and broken glass, the windows had shattered from the seismic disaster. "It'll take forever to clean this up." He couldn't keep a note of hope out of his voice, and George knew Fred was hoping that if the cleanup took long enough, George would forget what he wanted to talk about.

But Fred wasn't going to get off that easily. Without even looking around the room, George took out his wand and gave it a careless sort of wave. In a trice, all the boxes were back neatly on the shelves, the windows were repaired, and all the broken glass was put neatly in the dustbin, the floors magically scrubbed clean. Fred turned to face his twin with a sort of pleading expression.

"Please," he tried. "Please don't make me talk about it… it's too hard…"

"You talk about whatever it is to Percy, no problem," George snapped back; it was hard to find any sympathy for Fred when he insisted on such secrecy. "Why can't you tell me?" Now it was his turn to plead. "Don't you trust me?" He didn't miss the lone tear that leaked out of Fred's eye.

"Of course I do," Fred told him in a hoarse whisper. "It's just… I'm trying to protect you, that's all. You don't want to know what it is…" He gulped. "Sometimes it's better not to know what's coming." A few more tears spilled out of his eyes.

George was taken aback by Fred's reaction. When was the last time Fred had ever cried? He couldn't have been more than six the last time he had actually shed any tears… whatever was wrong must _really_ be bad.

"I know you said earlier I couldn't help you," he said softly, trying to mellow out this depression Fred had sunken into in the past twenty-four hours, "but won't you at least let me try?"

"There's nothing you can do," Fred repeated heavily. "There's nothing anyone can do… though that won't stop Percy from trying," he added bitterly. There was that resentment that Percy was saving his life again. George felt another stab of annoyance and fear over Fred's attitude, but he pushed it away as fast as he could as he reached out to his twin.

"Then let me try," George tried to say. "I know you way better than old Prefect Percy does…" He looked at Fred, trying to coax some sort of smile out of him, but he had no luck. "Whatever's wrong, it's my business too, way more than it is with Percy-"

"Except that it's not your business!" Fred snapped, his face full of pain. "You don't have to go through this, it's me that all this is happening to… it doesn't affect you!"

At this, George could no longer pretend to be civil. All the anger and pent-up frustration over being left out of some juicy secret, of having to lurk near a locked door just to overhear the tiniest snippet of what he should rightfully know anyway, of having to endure days of a distant, depressed Fred – it all came bursting out at Fred's last statement.

_"It doesn't affect me?"_ he hissed furiously, more angry with Fred at this moment than he had ever been with anyone in his entire life. "You honestly believe that something that's hurting you doesn't affect me? I've seen you lately… you're not yourself, you haven't so much as cracked a real smile since the end of the war! And you stand there and say that it doesn't affect me, like I don't care about you? You _know _me better than that, Fred! You have to have known that it's driven me crazy, not talking to you about what's bothering you, being left out of your stupid secret with Percy like I'm some dumb kid – I don't need you to protect me, Fred!"

Fred stood stock still, looking perhaps more shocked at George's outburst than George was himself. George was always more collected than Fred was; neither of them had expected the infamous Weasley temper to manifest itself at this time.

"I know," Fred finally whispered. "I know you don't need to be protected… and I know that you care about me… and that's why I can't tell you, because… because the truth would _kill you_." He turned and started to walk away, usually his indication that the subject was closed. But George wasn't going to let him off that easily. The only way he could think of to bring him back, however, was to voice the absurd thought he'd had earlier.

"I can handle the truth!" he called after his twin's retreating back. "I think I'd have the right to know that… that I'm the only one of us who will survive!"

Fred froze, his hand still on the doorknob. For one wild moment, George wanted to believe that an outlandish statement like that had caused him to stop… but then Fred turned around, and the unthinkable truth was written all over his anguished face. _No…_ George thought wildly. _I can't have been right… please let me have been wrong…_

"Percy told you?" Fred croaked, breaking the silence.

George slowly shook his head, unable to take his horrified eyes from Fred's face. "I heard you yelling that he should have let you die," he whispered. "But then again… I think I already knew that, before I heard you say so." He _had_ known since the night of the battle… he just hadn't wanted to believe it. A future without Fred in it had been too hard for him to face. There was a long moment where the notion of Fred's destiny sunk in for him, then –

_"Why?_" George whispered desperately. "Why do you want to die, Fred?"

Fred slowly blinked, not tearing his eyes from George's face. "I'm not going to die because I _want _to," he finally answered. "It's just that… I'm _supposed_ to." And with that, he left the shop, leaving George alone to deal with this unwanted knowledge and the numb thought that one day, Fred would leave him in a far more permanent way than walking out that door.

---

"Perce!" Molly Weasley gasped as her third son showed up at her door in the middle of the day, his face covered in blood and his nose possibly broken. "What's happened to you? Come in – " She ushered him in, practically dragging him by the arm to get him to move and sit down at the kitchen table. Percy sat down numbly, as though only dimly aware of where he was.

"What happened, dear?" she asked gently, dabbing at his face with a wet cloth to remove the drying blood. "Who did this to you?"

"Nobody," he mumbled thickly through his swollen nose. "There was an earthquake in Diagon Alley…"

"But that wouldn't do this to you!" Molly glared sternly at her son. Her children had been in enough fights for her to recognize what it looked like when someone had been on the losing side, and she had a sneaking suspicion that Percy wasn't the only child of hers involved in this incident. "Who did you get in a fight with, Percy?" she asked sharply.

He looked at her guiltily, as though trying to determine how much to tell her. "Don't go too hard on him," Percy told her hastily. "It was all my fault; he didn't do anything I didn't deserve…"

"You don't deserve this!" Molly looked at him shrewdly, trying to understand what Percy could have possibly done to make him think he merited this beating. The memory of Ginny and the twins pelting him with parsnips two Christmases ago came floating back to her, and she began to understand. "Was it the twins?" she asked sympathetically. "Were they mad that you left us? Because the rest of us forgive you, Perce…" She gently kissed his cheek, but he recoiled. "You came back, and that's all that really matters… we're a whole family again…"

"But not for long!" he cried abruptly. He got up and began to walk wildly about the room, without direction, and all Molly could do was watch him, her eyes wide. "No, we're never going to be whole, not really, and it'll be all my fault… No matter what, it's always going to be my fault!"

"What's going to be your fault?" Molly asked her son, perplexed by his unusual behavior, as he continued his wild pacing and raving.

"They'll blame me!" Percy was shouting. "Even though I'm the one trying to save him… He won't let me save him, Mum! He thinks it's bloody destiny that he should die… but he doesn't understand that if I leave him to his destiny, everyone else is going to blame me!" Percy shook his head, wringing his hands. "I try to save him, I get beat up; I let him die, and it's my fault because I didn't do anything to help him! I can't win, Mum! It'll be my fault no matter what I do…"

"What… Who are you talking about? Who's 'him'?"

"But he can't die, because then you'll never stop crying and the whole family will be completely miserable… George becomes a bloody alcoholic, but he never stops to think about that, does he? It's all about _him_, and _his _peace of mind, never mind what happens to the rest of us…" Percy sighed heavily. "But the truth is, he's right, and Penny's right: there's really nothing I can do to stop him from dying… and it makes me sad all day." Percy froze abruptly mid-pace, his eyes wide as he looked at something Molly could not see.

"Er… Perce?" she tried tentatively, frightened by her son's behavior. But Percy wasn't listening to her.

"Well, _perfect!_" he grumbled as he stormed out of the house, scowling heavily. Molly watched him go, worried about her son. Percy had always been picked on by his siblings, and it seemed that the twins weren't welcoming him back in the family as readily as she had hoped they would. But the raving was concerning her the most. She hadn't properly seen Percy for over three years, and she had no idea if he had been through something truly traumatic she needed to help him through. She hoped something wasn't seriously wrong with Percy's sanity.

He came bursting back through the door a few seconds later, carrying an enormous Muggle tool from Arthur's workshed Molly believed was called a monkey wrench. Still muttering under his breath about "ungrateful" and "my fault", Percy stormed up the stairs, and soon the loud clangs of metal on metal was heard.

"Bloody hell, what's going on in here?" cried Ron, coming in the door with Hermione and looking up the stairs toward the sound of the noise apprehensively. Molly looked at her youngest son, not quite sure what to tell him.

"You forgive Percy for the mistakes he made, don't you?" she asked him anxiously.

Ron looked taken aback by the question, but he set his jaw firmly.

"Well, I'm not going to pretend like it didn't happen," he responded gruffly, his face darkening. "But he saved George the other night and he helped Fred during the battle, so I guess he can't be all bad, can he?"

Molly glared at him. "That's not really the answer I was looking for," she told him sternly.

"Well, Mum, what do you want me to say?" he shot back. "I'm not going to forgive him for just abandoning us that easily… but he's still my brother, and he seems to regret what he did, so I won't hold it against him forever."

"What is that noise?" Hermione asked anxiously, distracting them both from their argument. "Sounds like the ghoul's gotten more aggressive since the last time I was here…"

Almost as though in answer to her question, Percy came storming down the stairs, still clutching the wrench and glowering, though inexplicably soaked with water. He looked around at the three of them as though he had almost forgotten anyone else was in the house.

"Shower's broken," he said innocently in response to their questioning looks, before stomping back out to the shed to replace the wrench. Molly, Ron, and Hermione just stared at him, watching him leave in silence before turning back to each other.

"What happened to his face?" Ron asked in a whisper to his mother.

"The twins, though he won't admit it." She sighed heavily, wondering how much more odd behavior she would have to tolerate from her sons. She had thought that the end of the war would bring an end to all their troubles, but judging from what had happened with Percy today, it would appear that she had been wrong. Something was definitely off with him, and for once, Molly Weasley had no idea how to handle it.

* * *

Yes, the girl in the shop is me. (grimaces in embarrassment) I just think George needs a love interest, and since _I_ love him... tell me if you think I should continue with her. It's definitely not going to be a huge thing (yes, I made myself a not-even-important plot device : P), this character will probably only in like one or two more chapters, though very briefly, and in the background. Hope you enjoyed the chapter... and if you did, leave me some of that love in a review, please. :) 


	10. Chapter 10

Once again, an uber-dark chapter. I am so sorry. But don't worry, I hope this will be the last truly nightmarish chapter. In other news, I have no idea what genres to put this story under... any ideas for a good way to classify this story? This chapter's the longest thing I've ever written. EVER. So I hope you enjoy it!

* * *

Percy threw the wrench back in his father's toolbox, still angry about the situation he found himself in. When he'd had this latest vision… well, he already knew that he couldn't just do nothing to save Fred, not after he'd tried to just sit back that morning. But Fred's reaction to his heroism made him unsure about how to act anymore. Fred had practically ordered him not to do anything else to save his life; he had practically beaten him senseless that morning after Percy had selflessly saved him, and then screamed that Percy was getting in the way of his fate, for Godric's sake!

Fate… there was that word again. It was absolutely illogical and absurd for Percy to believe in such things… and yet now both Fred and Penelope had shown they were absolutely convinced in its existence. But Percy had to interfere, especially when Fred's life was at stake! He had just come back to his family; it wasn't going to fall apart again because of him. He heaved a deep sigh and went back inside, ignoring the curious stares Ron, Hermione, and his mother were giving him again.

"Perce…" His mother's voice was hushed, gentle, as though at the bedside of a very sick person. "Are you quite sure you're all right?"

Percy mumbled incoherently under his breath, in order to avoid giving an intelligible answer. _Was_ he all right? He wasn't really even sure anymore. Could anybody who had seen the things he had truly be "all right"? He stumped up the stairs on the way to his room, drained of energy and ready to crash on his bed.

The only trouble was, someone was in his way on the first landing.

"Fred?" Percy asked, puzzled. "When did you get here? I thought you were still at the shop with George…" Fred didn't seem to hear him; he was chuckling to himself, his back toward Percy.

"Hey Fred!" Percy's annoyance with Fred's ingratitude was resurfacing, and he grabbed his brother by the shoulder, whipping him around to face him. "I'm trying to talk to…"

He stumbled back in horror at the sight that met his eyes. Fred's face, which had been spotless not half an hour before, was now covered in blood pouring from a great gash on his forehead. There were bruises covering his head and forearms, and he was covered in dust as though he had just fought his way through a quarry. He was no longer wearing his magenta work robes, but the T-shirt he was wearing was already soaked with his own blood. Fred was gravely injured, perhaps even fatally; yet he seemed oblivious to his injuries, still laughing softly to himself.

"Oh my God!" Percy yelled, trying to stem the blood flow from the wound on his brother's head. "Fred, what's happened to you? _What have you done to yourself?_"

Fred kept giggling quietly, his deadened eyes turned toward Percy, yet not focused on him. "You're… you're resigning, Perce? That's a good one… I haven't heard you make a joke since you were seven…" A trickle of blood was dribbling out of the corner of his mouth now. Percy bit back a scream; had Fred taken his "fate" into his own hands? Without pausing to think about why this was happening, Percy grabbed his brother by the wrist and dragged him downstairs with him, screaming, "Mum! MUM!!"

His mother came running into view at the bottom of the stairs, her eyes full of the panic Percy was feeling. "What? What's wrong?"

"It's Fred!" Percy cried, gesturing to his wounded brother helplessly as the blood continued dripping down his face and onto his shirt. "He's hurt; we have to take him to the hospital right away!"

"Why?" Ron spoke, coming into view. "What makes you think something's wrong with him?"

Percy gaped at Ron, aghast. "Isn't it obvious?" he bellowed, making both of them wince. "Just look at…" He turned back toward Fred, to show his mother and brother what they were obviously blind to… but his hand was closed on thin air, when he had been holding Fred's wrist just a moment before. Percy looked around wildly for some sign of his dying brother, but he was nowhere to be seen. "Where'd he go?"

"Where'd _who_ go?" asked Hermione, looking puzzled. Percy frowned and ran back up the stairs, trying to find some sign of Fred before it was too late. He was inwardly cursing himself; why hadn't he seen this accident coming, when he had seen all the others? He carefully studied the carpet for some sign that Fred had been there, but there were no visible footprints… and no drops of blood, either. Percy ran his hands through his hair, baffled. Where could Fred have possibly gone… and why wasn't there so much as a speck of his blood on the carpet? He had been bleeding a lot… some of it was sure to have gotten on something. But before he could question this, a horrible smell of burning flesh met his nostrils… and it was coming from the twins' room. He sprinted in that direction and flung open the door… only to be met with the sight of a Fred blackened with ash, his hair smoldering and smoke trailing from his body. He was covered in horrible burns; he was hardly recognizable.

"_Now_ what's happened to you?" Percy yelped, looking for some water, some healing potion… _anything_ to help repair the damage of whatever else had happened to Fred.

"He was in danger," Fred croaked through the ashes and soot clogging his throat. "George was going to die… I couldn't let that happen…" He coughed violently, his hair still smoking.

All Percy could do was gape in silence at what he was seeing. What did all this mean? Was Percy reliving the past now too? This was what would have happened if Fred had gone running to get George out of the burning shop the other day… Fred was supposed to have been killed in the fire that night. Then the bloodied, laughing Fred from earlier had surely been the outcome of the battle… Percy cursed himself for not having recognized that sight. It had, after all, haunted his nightmares for the week before Fred's funeral…

"Ange…" came a voice from behind him, and Percy whirled around to see yet another Fred, his hair standing on end, his skin gray and ashen, his eyes widened and his hands shaking. Percy yelped and pushed past this electrocuted Fred into the hallway, wanting nothing more than to run into his room and lock the door. He bounded up the second flight of stairs and slammed the door of his room shut behind him, heaving a sigh of relief as he leaned against the door with his eyes shut.

"Bloody hell, Percy." Percy's eyes flew open, petrified of what he might see next. Another Fred was sitting cross-legged on his bed, his eyes open and glassy and a giant, sharp potion bottle shard sticking out of the top of his head. "You look like you've seen a ghost." He giggled, pleased with his joke.

"Get out of here," Percy told his brother's animated corpse tremulously, walking toward it with trepidation and pointing a finger toward the door. "Just leave me alone, please!"

"We can't," said another Fred, the bloody battler from earlier, who was leaning nonchalantly against a wall, a huge bone-chilling grin still plastered on his bruised and battered face. "Perce… you can't escape this."

"We've tried to tell you," groaned the smoldering Fred, standing next to the electrocuted version behind Percy near the door; he jumped, not having noticed their arrival and having prayed that he had left them behind in Fred's room. "We've told you time and time again that we have to die… it's only your fault that there are this many of us."

"Get away…" Percy moaned, lying on his bed with his knees pulled up to his chest, turning away from the door in the hopes of avoiding the four corpses. The battle, the fire, the lightning, the earthquake… only one was missing –

His eyes widened in horror. Sure enough, there was the fifth vision of Fred's death come to life before him: Fred was standing there wrapped in a tattered blue bathrobe, soap still in his damp red hair and his skin still wet from the shower… and his head was dangling at an extremely odd angle, his neck obviously broken. "Boo," this Fred told him, smirking at the distress he was obviously causing Percy.

This was too much. Something in Percy snapped, and he began screaming at the top of his lungs, squeezing his eyes shut tight against the images of Fred's deaths following him. They weren't really anything new to him; every now and then for the past few days, he hadn't been able to stop himself from reliving his visions of Fred's death. But never before had he been stalked by dead Freds like this. And what was worse was the fact that he knew a few more of them would join their number every day.

There was a thundering sound of footsteps out in the hallway, and Percy heard his door bang open. "What's going on up here?" came George's anxious voice.

"George?" Percy's eyes were still squeezed tightly and he was facing away from his door, yet he couldn't help but wonder why George had showed up. "What are you doing here?"

"We closed the shop early and came back home for the day," George told him inconsequentially. "You were screaming like a banshee up here… what's wrong?"

"I… I can't tell you," said Percy tremulously. "I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to know…"

"Fred already told me everything," George said bluntly. "So you don't have to worry about keeping any of your precious secrets from me…" Percy could hear the bitterness in his voice. "I know, okay? I know that Fred's supposed to die… that he's supposed to be dead already." In spite of himself, Percy turned toward the door and opened his eyes a crack. George seemed to be fighting back tears, though he managed to keep a façade of togetherness. "There's just one thing I can't understand," he continued. "Why… why the _hell_ did you know about all that already, when I had to listen at the door and squeeze the truth out of him?" His normally calm face was twisted in anger and resentment.

Percy blinked in astonishment; if George really did know the whole truth, then the reason Percy already knew about Fred's near-deaths should be obvious. "You mean you don't already know?" he asked George, startled.

George shook his head slowly, his conviction that he was finally in on "the secret" melting away. Percy gave him a smile that was half-sympathetic, half-envious. "Then I guess you don't know _everything_, do you?" he said softly, turning his face toward the wall once more.

"Tell him about your flashes, Perce!" the battle-wounded Fred told him, a grin still displayed on his face. "He's sure to get a kick out of it… got to keep up your comedy streak, don't you?" He started laughing again.

"Shut up," Percy whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut once again, as if doing so could block those visions from his mind.

"I didn't say anything!" George said indignantly.

"I know _you_ didn't," Percy said through gritted teeth, "I was talking to Fred over here!" He was sure George's eyes were widened in shock, but George said nothing more.

"I've already almost died twice today, Percy," one of his visions told him; Percy refused to open his eyes and find out which one it was. "Death is getting more insistent… it's calling me more often now."

"I know that!" Percy shouted blindly at it. "But just because you're having accidents more often, do you really think that's going to stop me?"

"Do you honestly think you're going to stop my death?" another apparition shot back. "I'm out of time, Percy! I ran out of time four days ago…"

"No you didn't!" Percy screamed, clamping his hands tightly over his ears.

"Well, you _know_ I did! That's why you almost let me die this morning…"

"But I couldn't do it!" Percy was rocking back and forth, clutching his knees that were drawn up to his chest. "Fine, all right, I admit it! You're right! You were right about destiny and fate, all that crap, it's true, but I still can't let it happen! If you have to die, it's not going to happen because of me…"

"Who are you _talking_ to?" George interrupted loudly. Percy's eyes flew open; he had completely forgotten that George was bearing witness to all this. He slowly turned to face his brother, who was looking horrified by Percy's ravings.

"What do you mean?" Percy asked him. "I'm talking to Fred… all… five of him…" He trailed off, suddenly realizing how ridiculous he must sound. "They're all right there!" he tried to tell George, pointing at his visions, who were all smiling and waving at their twin. "Can't you see them?"

George gave no sign that he had heard or seen any of them, for he merely glanced over to the corner Percy gestured toward before turning back to Percy, looking disturbed.

"I don't know what you think you're doing," he whispered, "but you're not funny. Fred's not here, Percy… he's downstairs. And there's only one of him, anyway."

Just then, Ginny came bursting in the door, clad in her fluffy pink bathrobe, looking absolutely furious.

"What the bloody hell happened to the shower?" she shouted at her two brothers.

"I had to do it, Ginny!" Percy tried to explain. "You didn't want _that_ to happen, do you?" He pointed at the Fred who had broken his neck.

"I didn't want _what_ to happen?" Ginny was exasperated. "Perce, I'm disgusting right now; and you expect me to walk around this filthy for the rest of the day?" She sighed. "Perce, what on earth could have possessed you to break off the shower head, and then to jinx it so it can't be repaired magically?"

"I told you, it was dangerous! Fr- someone could have fallen and broken their neck, so I had to do something!"

Ginny just shook her head in annoyance. "You're out of control, Percy," she said darkly before retreating back downstairs.

"I'm not crazy!" Percy yelled after her; but no sooner had the words left his mouth than he began to doubt the truth of his own words. "Or maybe I am," he mumbled.

"You don't really believe that," said the electrocuted ghost soothingly.

Percy whirled on him and the rest of his premonitions made reality. "You're not really here!" he shouted at all of them. "I've had a concussion… maybe several concussions," he added; time travel made it kind of difficult to count how many times he'd actually been hit in the head. "You're all in my head, that's all!"

"And what about those visions?" asked the burn victim. "Are those all in your head too?"

"Maybe this is all a bad dream," Percy mused, "and I'm still unconscious at Fred's funeral, and this whole time travel thing never happened…"

"What are you talking about?" George interrupted sharply. "Fred's funeral? He's still alive, for Godric's sake! We can't go start talking about that already, not when he's still alive and with us!"

Percy jumped once more. "I forgot you were here," he confessed to his brother. He realized belatedly that he had said a little too much: for one thing, he had mentioned how he had traveled back in time, though George still didn't know too much about the details of what had happened. Though, he considered, the fact that he had gone back to the battle hadn't really made much of an impact in how he'd been acting recently. Saving Fred at the battle had completely changed the future, and he was now in a sort of alternate reality where, were it not for the flashes he kept getting, he would have no idea what to expect.

"So are you going to let him die?" George asked angrily. "Just because he told you to, that's no reason to give up on him! He'd _never_ give up on you!"

"He's got a point," admitted the fallen warrior.

"Shut up!" hissed Percy to the Fred-vision. George misunderstood the statement and glowered.

"Well, fine then," he huffed, storming out of the room and slamming the door behind him, leaving Percy alone with his nightmarish hallucinations and his doubts that any of this – his acts of heroism, Fred's apparent depression, even drinking tea with Penelope – had happened at all.

---

Meanwhile, the real Fred was drumming his fingers anxiously on the kitchen table, wondering what Percy and George were up there talking about. Though George had managed to squeeze one small morsel of truth out of him – the fact that it was his fate to die – he was still hoping to shield his twin from as much of the rest of it as possible. George still didn't know about Percy's visions, and he wanted it to stay that way. He knew George didn't need any more reasons to hate Percy: after their brother left their family, George had taken it much harder than any of the rest of them; and even now that Percy had reconciled with the rest of them George was tending to be harsher towards Percy than the rest of them were. True, some of that was probably due to George's anger that Fred and Percy were keeping this big secret from him, but most of it was because George still hated Percy for leaving their family when they needed him.

George came stumping down the stairs, keeping his eyes on Fred. There was no glimmer of betrayal in his eyes, though there was a tinge of sorrow that was almost certainly due to the news he had learned earlier from him.

"Well?" Mrs. Weasley asked anxiously. "What's wrong with Percy? What can we do to help him?"

George hesitated a moment before speaking. "Mum, I don't really know how to tell you this…" He took a deep breath, and Fred braced himself, certain that George was about to tell the whole family about Fred's impending doom. "Percy's a nutter," George concluded.

The reaction was almost immediate: Hermione clapped her hands to her mouth in shock, Ron looked incredulous, while Ginny looked like she should have expected it all along. Fred slumped in his chair, feeling nothing but relief at the moment. He had been so afraid that the family would find out about his secret, and then he would have to deal with not only one overprotective sibling (or two, now that George knew the truth), but ten people all breathing down his neck trying to prevent the inevitable. Mrs. Weasley was nothing short of irate at George's words.

"George Fabian Weasley!" she shouted. "I don't care how angry you might be at your brother, that's completely uncalled for!"

"But Mum, it's true!" George tried to say. "He's up there, talking to people who aren't there… he thinks there's five Freds up there right now, and he's been screaming at all of them for a good half hour!"

"Five of me?" gasped Fred. George nodded fervently.

"He thinks he's traveled back in time too," George snorted derisively. "And that's not the worst of it… Mum, he's become completely paranoid about the daftest things."

"That's true," Ginny threw in. "He took the shower apart because he was afraid one of us would fall and break our neck."

"You know," Ron said slowly, "he has been having a bit of a 'saving-people-thing' lately…"

Hermione scoffed. "Oh come on, what could possibly make you believe _that_, Ronald?"

"No, really!" Ron said, trying to convince her. "Look… Fred, we saw you two during the battle, and Percy tackled you to save you from that castle wall, remember?" Fred nodded slowly; he wasn't likely to ever forget the moment his life had ended, though his heart continued beating. "And George," Ron continued, "Percy pulled you out of that burning building the other day too!"

"You're right," Ginny said slowly. "And now I guess he's run out of crises to save us from, so he's made up some more so he can continue playing the hero…"

"Like the shower," George agreed. "I think you're right, Ron… Percy's become obsessed with saving us."

_Not us,_ Fred thought. _Just me._

"Do you reckon he thinks if he saves us enough times we'll welcome him back into the family?" Ron murmured.

"That has to be what he's doing," Ginny nodded. "It's the only explanation that makes any sense… but I think he's taking things a little too far, inventing threats to us and then fixing them."

"He's gotten a little paranoid," George told them all. "This morning he ran all the way through Diagon Alley just to knock Fred to the ground… and back there I think he was saying something about… if one of us is going to die, it's not going to be because of him…"

"He's got to be stopped," Fred interjected, having been thinking hard about how to solve this problem while his siblings had been discussing Percy. "He's gotten a little out of hand, and I think we should do something before he does something really stupid."

Mrs. Weasley's face had been getting paler and paler as their conversation progressed, but she seemed to believe their theory that Percy had truly lost his mind, so she asked her son in a small voice, "What do you think we should do then, Fred?"

Fred hesitated for a fraction of a second before replying, "We should take him to St. Mungo's. They can help him there, give him the treatment he needs to recover from this psychosis… plus if we get him out of this environment maybe he won't be so worried about protecting… us."

"We're going to kick him out?" Mrs. Weasley gasped, her eyes filling up with tears. "Now, when he's finally come back to us?"

"It'll only be for a little while," he told her reassuringly. "And no, we're not trying to get rid of him; we're trying to get Percy the help he needs so he can go back to normal."

"It's fairly normal to do this kind of thing for Muggles," Hermione explained to the Weasleys. "People have psychotic breakdowns all the time, and they go to mental institutions so they can get better, or so they can fix the problems they have."

Hermione's words had gotten rid of his mother's scruples, Fred was glad to see, and so his mother and siblings seemed to agree with his idea. Relief flooded through Fred. It was all very neat, if he said so himself: with Percy out of the way and locked up safely in the hospital, nothing could get in the way of his destiny. He was frankly tired of trying to outwit death. He could run all he wanted, but as he told Percy, none of it had made any difference. He was going to die; every delay Percy had made had only changed how that would happen. The last thing he wanted to do was leave all the people he loved, but he didn't see any other way to stop fate pursuing him.

"Well, no time like the present, I guess," Fred murmured, getting up from the table to go get Percy and take him to St. Mungo's.

"I'll come with you," George said, jumping up too. The two of them headed up the stairs in silence, while Fred was hoping that Percy wouldn't spot this commitment to a mental institution for what it really was. "I'm warning you, it's not a pretty sight," George cautioned outside Percy's door, pushing gently on the wood to open it.

Fred gawked at the sight that met his eyes. The room was in complete disarray: chairs had been thrown against the wall and broken; the lamp that usually stood on Percy's bedside table had been smashed, since that had been thrown against the wall too. Percy stood on his bed in the middle of the wreckage, holding a pillow and whacking it at some sort of invisible foe.

"Get away from me!" he was shouting at the enemy he was trying to hurt with the pillow. "_Stop haunting me!"_

"Told you," George muttered, who seemed as surprised as Fred was to find the room in this state. "Except when I left, he was just raving, he wasn't throwing things or anything…"

Fred was actually almost pleased to discover Percy acting so oddly. The idea that he was mentally ill hadn't seemed so plausible until he saw Percy's behavior with his own eyes, and he was sure no one would question why Percy was being committed.

"STOP LAUGHING!" Percy was yelling at the air. "QUIT LAUGHING… IT'S NOT FUNNY, FRED!"

"I wasn't laughing!" Fred shouted over Percy's yells, making his brother drop his pillow in astonishment and run over to the pair of them.

"Another one?" he breathed, getting way to close to Fred, scrutinizing him. "Well, what happened to _you,_ then?"

"What do you mean?" Fred asked uneasily, troubled by the look Percy was giving him.

"Well, that guy was electrocuted, that guy broke his neck…" Percy jerked his thumb over his shoulder at something Fred couldn't see. "So how'd you die, then?"

"I haven't died yet," Fred told Percy, too shocked by his behavior to properly process what Percy was telling him. "Though I probably don't have too much longer either… anyway, Perce, we have good news for you!"

"Yeah," said George cheerfully, though he threw half a worried glance at Fred. "We're giving you a little holiday, Perce!"

"Holiday?" said Percy distractedly, now raising Fred's arm up to his eye level and examining it closely.

"It'll be great," Fred told him in the same sort of honeyed voice he remembered his own parents adopting when they had been small, yanking his arm out of Percy's reach. "You can stay in bed all day, and there'll be people to take care of you, and you won't have to worry about anything for a long time."

"Except how do I know you'll be safe?" Percy asked him suspiciously.

"Because he's not in danger," George said firmly, taking a bottle of potion out from under his magenta work robes. "Now drink this – it's pumpkin juice."

Inexplicably, Percy drank the sleeping potion without complaint, though keeping his eyes carefully on Fred as he did so. The effect was almost instantaneous: within moments, Percy was slumped on the floor, unconscious.

"Except that I _am_ in danger," Fred told George in an undertone, though there was no chance of anyone overhearing them.

"Only according to Percy," George murmured, though Fred could tell he wasn't convinced. "For all we know, he really could be inventing all these crises, just like Ginny was saying down there."

Fred gaped at George; ignorance truly was bliss, with denial a close second. "So… what?" he asked his twin incredulously. "Are you saying that Percy caused the earthquake? Did he start the fire, too? And I suppose you're going to say he can also control the weather and make me almost get hit by lightning…"

"Lightning?" George gasped, and Fred realized rather belatedly that he had never mentioned the mishap of the previous day.

"Yeah, I was _this close_ to getting hit by lightning!" Fred said, holding his thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart. "Things like that don't just happen randomly, and they're certainly not being caused by anyone either."

"The universe really _is_ out to get you," George muttered. Fred gave a laugh as a sign of agreement that for once, contained no humor. "Well, in that case, you know what you've got to do, don't you?"

"No, what's that?"

George sighed before meeting his twin's eyes. "Live like you're dying," he said simply, and Fred knew George was right. He had no idea how much time he might have left, though now that Percy was out of the picture it surely couldn't be too much more. All he could do was make the best of the hours he was stealing from death, and spend as much time as possible with the people he loved.


	11. Chapter 11

Fred woke up bright and early that morning, afraid of missing a single second of this day. As far as he knew, his accidents had been occurring fairly regularly, with one each day; now that Percy was no longer around to protect him, today was almost certainly the day he would die. There was a slight chance that George might step in to save him, though George had the disadvantage of not knowing what was coming, so it was rather unlikely. Though the notion that he might die today had been depressing him over the last few days, Fred was determined to act as normally as possible today. There was no sense in living if you couldn't enjoy it, after all; and today especially, he had to make every moment count.

He scrambled out of bed and threw on his favorite T-shirt, a faded purple one that had once belonged to Bill that bore the logo of the Weird Sisters. He peered out the window: he couldn't have asked for a more beautiful day. The sun was shining brightly even at this early hour of the morning, birds were chirping happily, and a few puffy white clouds drifted lazily across the sky. Smiling, he walked over to where his sleeping twin still lay, passed out cold.

"Get up!" he said cheerily, jumping on George. "Time to wake up, lazybones!"

George jerked awake, and from the scathing look he was getting from his drowsy twin, Fred could tell he wasn't all that pleased. "Do you have any idea what time it is?" he groaned.

"No, and I don't really care," Fred told him, grinning. "Now come on, get up!"

"I don't wanna," George mumbled blearily. "I like my sleep, okay? It keeps me pretty, and stops me from killing my crazy twin…" He rolled over, pulling his covers over his tousled red hair.

"Hey, maybe _you're_ supposed to do me in today, then!" said Fred in an attempt at humor that didn't go over particularly well with George; almost instantly, George sat up with a mournful look on his face. "Oh, calm down, I was just kidding!" he said bracingly. "You'll just have to drink a lot of coffee today to save me from your murderous rages, that's all." He grinned, trying to smooth over the tension.

"Coffee?" George's eyes widened. "Oh no…"

"What's up?"

"Well, it's just that… I forgot to tell you this, it completely slipped my mind until just now… but yesterday this girl in the shop asked me out for coffee," George explained in a rush.

"Really?" Fred was eternally grateful for a new topic of conversation, to take both their attentions away from his impending death. "Was she cute?"

George nodded, a somewhat shy smile on his face. "But I'll probably never see her again," he said, sobering. "I kind of kicked her out with the rest of the customers yesterday without giving her an answer… plus I don't exactly know her name," he added, obviously feeling stupid.

"Well, then I guess we've found the first thing we're going to do today," said Fred, seizing George by the forearm in an attempt to drag him out of bed. "We've got to track down this mystery girl so you can take her on a hot date!"

"It's just coffee," George tried to say, as he searched for clean socks on the floor of their room. "And she's probably lost interest in me by now, after how I treated her."

"Nonsense!" said Fred airily. "Today's our day, Forge… today, we can do anything we want! It's going to be awesome!"

"How many Crimson Taurine potions have you had today?"

"None… yet," Fred responded cheekily, and the two of them laughed together for the first time in days. Things were going well so far: already, their relationship was back to normal, and Fred was sure that for his last day on Earth, he would actually be good company for the people he wanted to spend time with.

As soon as they were both dressed, Fred bounded down the stairs, closely followed by George, to an empty kitchen. Fred realized rather belatedly that he should have expected that: it was, after all, barely six in the morning, and his mother needed her sleep as much as any of the rest of them did. And if it was too early for their mother to be up making breakfast, it was certainly too early for the two of them to track down some mysterious girl from the joke shop. But just sitting and waiting for people to wake up would be a waste of Fred's last day, so he turned to George and said, "Let's fly around the orchard for a while!"

"You woke me up at five-thirty so we could play Quidditch?" said George grumpily.

"No," said Fred solemnly, "I got you up so you could spend the entire day with me. And it's going to be a day both of us will never forget." _In more ways than one._

George sighed, but followed his twin out to the orchard, where both of them were properly woken up by the crisp morning air rushing against their faces as they both mounted their brooms and kicked off from the ground. Fred closed his eyes and savored this moment: the feeling of flying, of being invincible, was an illusion he wanted to hold onto for as long as possible. For most of his life he had thought himself indestructible; that notion had been shattered to pieces once he learned how many times he had nearly died in the last few days, and that there was no way he could possibly survive this day either. Flying had always been one of his passions growing up; being on the Hogwarts Quidditch team was how he had met some of his best friends; in fact, much of his life had revolved around this sport, so it was so appropriate that his last day should start with this.

After a good hour or so, Fred's stomach began to growl for breakfast, so the two ventured back inside to find their mother awake and cooking bacon. "Good morning, boys," she said cheerfully, waving her wand to pour them two hot cups of coffee. "You're certainly up early."

"We're seizing the day," Fred told her, grinning as he helped himself to pancakes and taking an enormous bite. "These are delicious, Mum!" he told her sincerely.

"Well, thank you, Fred," she said, looking surprised but pleased at her son's unusual display of gratitude.

"Mum, you're amazing," Fred told her in between bites. "You've had to put up with so much from us over the years: all the jokes and the pranks, and us being in trouble every other day…" He put down his fork, walked over to his mother and wrapped his arms around her. "I just want to thank you for… well, everything you've ever done for me." He hugged her tightly, an embrace she returned somewhat weakly; it was clear that his behavior was baffling her.

"You're welcome, dear," she said, pulling away slightly and smiling at him gently in a confused sort of way, "but it's not Mother's Day, so you don't have to bother kissing up to me."

"Every day should be Mother's Day," Fred told her, grinning; behind her back, George was shaking his head incredulously at his twin. "Well, thanks again for the breakfast, Mum, but we've got to be off. George has a hot date he should be getting to!"

"No, I don't," George corrected sourly. "Stop lying, Fred…"

"Where is your sense of _carpe diem?_" Fred teased, seizing his twin's arm and pulling him into the back garden so they could Disapparate. George pulled his arm away as soon as they were out of the view of the kitchen window.

"What the bloody hell has gotten into you today?" he hissed. "We're not going to have to commit you too, are we?"

"Why would you?" Fred asked him, grinning. "_I'm_ not the crazy one; Percy is."

"Except you know that he's not crazy!" George shouted. "He's telling the truth, and you know it! What, did you just not like the fact that he's trying to save your life? Are you going to have _me_ locked up too if I try and help you, Fred?"

"No!" Fred shook his head fervently. "It's just… Percy and I needed to spend some time apart. All my near-death experiences were… unhinging him, and I thought if he was forced to leave me alone then maybe he could…" Fred sighed. "Look, can we just not think about Percy today?"

George had been scrutinizing his twin closely. "Are you sure that _you're _not the one who's coming unhinged?" he asked quietly.

Fred hesitated. He wouldn't go so far as to call himself crazy, but he knew that everything that had happened to him over the last few days hadn't exactly left him untouched, either.

"I don't think I'm losing my mind, exactly," he finally answered. "But… I'm not really the way I used to be, either." No one could examine the possibility of imminent death and be able to keep pretending everything was normal, after all. He certainly hadn't been able to do it, first sinking into depression and now feigning boisterously high spirits in an attempt to enjoy himself as much as possible.

George paused for a moment to consider these words, then nodded and said in a hoarse whisper, "Okay then." And together, they Apparated away to the shop, to start their search for the mystery coffee girl.

---

They arrived at the shop with a sort of half-baked plan of attack in mind: The girl had left her box of Canary Creams yesterday, and hopefully she would come soon to pick them up, and George could then ask her out. George was keeping watch in the front of the store in case she came by; Fred, meanwhile, was in the back room brainstorming up new product ideas as fast as he could, yelling suggestions back and forth with George. They hadn't opened the store to the public today; Fred had insisted that the last thing he wanted to do today was make more money, an unusual confession in itself, but George had let it slide. He didn't know why, but Fred seemed to associate Percy's presence with survival (no doubt because Percy had saved him during the battle, George reasoned), and now that he was gone Fred seemed to think he would die that day. He had obviously taken George's suggestion to "live like he was dying" seriously, which explained why he was so determined to have a good day and treat everyone so well.

"How about, like, Extendable Arms?" came Fred's voice. "So you can reach things on high shelves?"

"That's a terrible idea!" George yelled back; in their creative process, George had always tried to be the voice of reason for Fred's sometimes far-fetched ideas.

"Well, I'm writing it down anyway," Fred told him stubbornly, and George laughed. "You might need something to invent later…"

"Fred, can I ask you something?" George asked abruptly.

"Of _course_ I'm leaving you everything I own," Fred replied, coming into the main room holding a notebook and a quill, ink splattered on his nose. "Who else would rightfully get it? Though I guess I should leave Ron some of my old socks…"

"That's not what I mean," George said, smiling in spite of himself. "Why are you so obsessed with helping me find this girl? Shouldn't you be doing more exciting things with your time?"

"Spending time with you _is_ exciting, Georgie boy," Fred grinned at him. "And," he added on a more serious note, "I want to make sure you won't be completely alone when I'm gone."

George frowned in confusion. "So you're setting me up with this total stranger?" he asked incredulously.

"Well, Alicia's with Oliver and things didn't work out between you and Katie," Fred explained, "and Angelina's off-limits." He frowned sternly at his twin, though the effect was spoiled by the smile still on his face. "So I figured, why not?"

"But she doesn't know me," George tried to explain. "And… I dunno… she'll probably be kind of put off by _this._" He indicated the place where his left ear should have been, that was now just a dark hole in his head.

"Well, remember, she's already asked you out," Fred said seriously. "So she probably doesn't mind your holeyness… and if she did, she's definitely not right for you."

George sighed. Much as he enjoyed joking around with Fred about his disfigurement, he wished that he hadn't lost one of his ears. Most people tended to stare at it when talking to him, and it made him very self-conscious. He had tried growing his hair out to hide the scar, but there wasn't really any way to make it look as though he still had both ears.

Fred seemed to sense how he was feeling, because he said, "You know I'd give you one of my ears if I could." He smiled understandingly.

George looked deliberately at him and spoke in a whisper: "And I'd give you my life if _I _could." He struggled against the tears that had welled up in his eyes, but he couldn't fool his twin; Fred wrapped George in a tight hug, and George held on to Fred for dear life. He would give anything – _anything_ – to stop Fred from dying. He wished the two of them could go on like this forever, joking and laughing and creating new pranks together, eventually dying at the same time and maybe even getting buried in each others' graves by accident. But it just wasn't meant to be. Time was ticking away for Fred, and George was going to get left behind.

There was a soft rapping at the door, and George looked up. It was the girl from yesterday, looking none too eager to be there… the same way he did. "That's her," he told Fred, wiping away the tears that had spilled from his eyes. "But I don't… I don't think I can talk to her right now…"

Fred considered for a moment; he, too, seemed to decide that George was too emotionally fragile at the moment to deal with her, so he said, "I'll ask her out for you, if you want."

George nodded rapidly, handing his twin the box of Canary Creams and sinking down beneath the counter, so she wouldn't be able to see him eavesdropping on their conversation. He heard the tinkling of bells as Fred opened the front door.

"Hi there," Fred said cheerfully to her. "I bet you're back for your Canary Creams, right?"

"Um… yes," said the girl, sounding a bit uncomfortable talking to Fred. "Well, thanks, er…"

"Oh, I'm Fred," he told her.

"Nice to meet you, Fred," she said. "I'm Meg."

"Cool," said Fred. "Well, I know you met my brother yesterday… you know, George?"

"Oh," Meg said, and George felt his heart sink at her less-than-enthusiastic tone of voice. "Right… well, he didn't seem all that friendly, to be honest…"

"George?" Fred laughed heartily. "Well, he's a little shy… plus he was just having a bad day yesterday." _She has no idea,_ George thought ruefully. "But he told me to tell you that he's definitely interested in taking you out."

"Why isn't he here telling me himself then?" Meg asked skeptically. George could tell that she thought the whole thing was a setup, so he scrambled to his feet and into sight.

"Because I was busy planning a really good day for us," he told her, hating himself already for buying into Fred's crazy scheme. "That is, if you're up for it… are you free at all today?"

"Um…" Meg said uncomfortably, shuffling her feet, "I don't really have anything planned yet…"

"Well, we were planning on going to the seaside later on, if you want to come," George invented wildly on the spot. "There's no pressure; Fred's going to bring his girlfriend too." This seemed to visibly relax her, as she nodded in agreement.

"That sounds like fun," she told them. "So, I'll see you here around noon, then?" With a smile, Meg took her box of Canary Creams, handing Fred two Galleons as she did so, and departed, looking back with a smile and a wave.

The twins watched her go; then Fred turned to George and said seriously, "I think she's going to marry you someday." George just glared at him, but then looked apologetic.

"Sorry I kind of took over your plans for the day," he said contritely. "I dunno what I was thinking… it's supposed to be your day, after all…"

"It's supposed to be _our_ day," Fred corrected. "And I actually think it was a good idea… I haven't seen Ange since the lightning almost struck a few days ago, so… it's good," he concluded quietly. If nothing else, this could be his way of saying goodbye.

George just stared at him. "But you hate the seaside," he said disbelievingly.

"I've never been to the seaside," Fred corrected. "So how will I know if I hate it or not? Might as well try it out today, you know?" _After all_, he thought in spite of himself, _what could possibly go wrong?_

---

Percy lay prone on the bed in the mental ward, restrained by thick leather straps encircling his body. _Was all this really necessary?_ he wondered, annoyed. After all, he hadn't tried to hurt anyone, so why did his family find it necessary for him to be locked up? He tried to remember how he had ended up in this situation, but all he could remember clearly was drinking out of that bottle George had given him and descending into darkness… Percy cursed silently. Even after twenty years of being their brother, he still hadn't learned to not touch anything the twins gave him to drink. Though, in his defense, he had been more than a little distracted by those hallucinations of dead Freds yesterday, and hadn't been thinking all that clearly.

"Good morning, Mr. Weasley!" said the trainee Healer, bustling in with a tray of breakfast, as well as a flask of some kind of light green potion. "I hope you slept well?"

"Fine," said Percy, struggling feebly against the straps tying him to his bed. "Why've you strapped me down like this?"

"It's for your own good, Mr. Weasley," she told him sympathetically. "We want to make sure you don't try to hurt yourself… as your brothers told us, you've been demonstrating some violent tendencies lately."

"I don't know, I don't remember that," Percy muttered; most of the last day had been a blur he was trying very hard to forget about. "Do you know what's wrong with me yet?" He held his breath, praying that they would tell him that the premonitions had been all in his head, and that there had never been a fire, or a sudden thunderstorm, or an earthquake… that they had all been the imaginary results of his concussion.

"Well, as far as we can tell, you had a sort of… panic attack," said the Healer gently, helping Percy sip some orange juice through a straw. "Possibly the result of post-traumatic stress disorder…" She hesitated. "If you don't mind me asking, Mr. Weasley, have you been through some sort of distressing incident lately? Perhaps something happened in the Battle of Hogwarts, or… someone close to you has recently died?"

"Well, he did die, but then I went back in time and he was alive again," Percy said matter-of-factly. He was fully aware of how crazy he was sounding, but he didn't care. It was far better to be crazy than to really be clairvoyant.

"Did you really?" The Healer rolled her eyes at Percy while taking his pulse. "Your mother mentioned that you were having some sort of delusions…"

"Oh, but it was real!" Percy said, his eyes round and overly sincere. If the Healers thought he was delusional, they'd be far more likely to help him get rid of his flashes; because otherwise, he would be hailed as a Seer, and that was something he didn't want at all. These visions were not something that should be celebrated; they were destroying him from the inside, and since Fred didn't want to be saved, he didn't want to know how he should save him, in order to prevent at least some portion of the crippling guilt.

"Well, we'll have to do some tests to figure out what to do about those," the Healer said soothingly, "but in the meantime, drink your Calming Draught and we'll go from there." Percy accepted the medicine meekly.

However, no sooner had the last drop passed between his lips than it happened, and a surge of panic struck him almost instantly. He saw flashes of things in his mind which meant something that surely spelled the end for Fred, and he knew instinctively that he had to stop it. He tried to get out of bed… before he remembered that he was strapped down, unable to move. He struggled weakly, knowing it was no use.

"Um, excuse me," he said, trying to act calm, "do you think that maybe you could untie me, Healer…" He squinted to read her nametag. "…Grey?"

"I don't think so," Healer Grey said. "I'm actually under strict orders to leave you restrained, so you can't hurt yourself…"

"But…" Percy tried to think of some excuse, still struggling. "I, um… have to go somewhere now… urgent appointment…"

Healer Grey smirked. "Nice try, Mr. Weasley, but you've got to stay here."

"No!" Percy shouted, his urge to get to Fred becoming more urgent by the second. He might not want his visions anymore, but that didn't mean he was just going to ignore this one. "Please listen to me… you have to let me go! He's in danger… I have to help him!"

"Now, just calm down," the Healer said soothingly, while slowly backing toward the door of the ward. "Everything's going to be all right, Mr. Weasley." She slowly reached into the drawer of the medical station, withdrawing something Percy couldn't see. "We're here to help you, remember? Pretty soon this whole mess will be over." Without warning, she plunged a syringe into Percy's arm, depositing the bright blue contents into his veins. Percy gave a cry of alarm, then felt himself abruptly sinking into blackness once more. _No, _he thought vaguely, _I'm not crazy… __please… no…__ Fred…_

---

"What are we doing here?" Angelina asked, looking around at their surroundings. "Fred, you hate the seaside!"

"Why does everyone keep saying that?" said Fred grumpily. "I don't hate the seaside, I just never go, that's all!" He looked over at Meg and George, who were building a sandcastle and chatting happily. He was at least glad to see that bringing Meg along hadn't been a total disaster for George; but he right now, he was more than happy enough to leave them alone and be with Angelina. "Come on," he told Angelina, seizing her by the hand. "Let's go for a swim!"

The two of them dove into the waves, shivering at first at the temperature of the water but quickly becoming accustomed to it. They swam out a little ways, laughing and splashing, the ocean up to their shoulders, the bright sunlight reflecting off the waves in an almost hypnotic fashion. Still grinning, Fred floated on his back and shut his eyes lazily. His body was drifting slowly on the current, and it was all very relaxing.

As fun as all this was, George and Angelina had been right: he wasn't a big fan of the seaside. It was nice to just be able to sit back and relax, but it wasn't at all his style to be so passive. Had that been why he had been feeling so conflicted the last few days? He had wanted to sit back and let death catch up to him, but was unable to do so, in part due to Percy's interference and in part due to his nature. Though it had helped that Percy had never explicitly told him of what was coming, even when he tried to listen. Percy had always considered himself as the only one capable of helping Fred, not letting him try to save himself; and that, maybe more than anything, was why he had decided to get rid of his brother. If he was going to die, it was much better if he didn't know exactly what was happening. He sighed, already bored with the beach and ready to move on.

"Come on, Ange," he said, his eyes still closed against the glare of the sun, "let's get out of here."

Angelina didn't answer.

"Ange?" he repeated, opening his eyes a crack and raising his head. "Did you hear me?"

But she was nowhere to be found. Frowning, Fred sat up in the water, only to have fear course through him. The shore where he had left George and Meg was a long way off, almost a kilometer away; Angelina was just visible getting out of the ocean and walking over to them. Tentatively, Fred reached a toe down to the sandy bottom of the sea. He felt nothing; it was much too far down, and the only hope of keeping his head above the waves was to keep treading water.

"Help!" he shouted. "Help!!" But it was no good; he was too far away for any of his friends to hear him. Just when he began to swim back, he felt a great tugging on his body: not towards the safety of dry land, but down into the crushing blackness of the ocean. The current was dragging him down; and as soon as that revelation hit him, Fred's head disappeared beneath the waves.

And in that moment, Fred knew that this would be it. This was how he was going to die: alone, in the middle of the ocean, with no hope of rescue. He knew there was nothing to do but accept what was happening to him, as he had been trying to do for the past five days. He had to go with the flow, because if he fought this death, he would just die another way later. There was no way of escaping this current, just as there was also no way of escaping death. And slowly, Fred Weasley stopped struggling and let himself sink.

But even as he was letting go, the faces of all the people he loved were flashing in front of his eyes.

_Bill and Charlie, crashing tables into each other, laughing the whole time… _

_His father, scolding __him and George__ for flying the __Ford Anglia __while amusement twinkled in his eyes… _

_Ron's wide-eyed innocence as he spun a tale about wrestling a troll to get placed in Gryffindor… _

_Ginny's smiling face as they cheered over Harry's triumph in his hearing… _

_His__ mother, beaming as she saw that a joke shop could be a suitable profession for two of her sons after all… _

_The__ glee on Percy's face as he felled __Thicknesse__… _

_The__ love shining in Angelina's eyes during the Yule Ball… _

_And__ George… ever__y time they had laughed together, every time they had shared a joke, or __pranked__ someone together, and the way they had left school in their seventh year… every moment over the course of his twenty years had been shared with his twin, and now he had to embark on this next great adventure alone…_

And at that moment, as the life was being forced from him by the crushing weight of the ocean, as he finally realized what he had to give up, Fred felt true panic grip him for maybe the first time ever. _I'm not ready, _he thought hysterically, trying in vain to get back to the surface, to stop this inevitable end from happening. _I'm not ready to leave all of them yet… I'm too young to die!_ He thrashed his arms and legs frantically, trying to break free of the current holding his head underwater, but it was no good. He couldn't accept that this was it; it was too early! He was only twenty years old, and he had barely begun to live…

But death had more things in mind than giving Fred what he finally realized he wanted; fate had long ago decided that he was unfit for the normal life most people could never appreciate. And as his last breath slowly escaped from his lips and darkness overtook him, as he slipped away from his life, all the great Fred Weasley could feel was complete and utter terror.

* * *

Heh, I'm so evil, ending on a cliffhanger like that... never fear, the next chapter is already about halfway written and should hopefully be up soon. 


	12. Chapter 12

"…And that's how I saved Christmas!" Meg concluded, grinning, making George laugh riotously at her story. He was rather pleased with how things had been going so far on their date; it hadn't been as awkward as he had feared, but neither had it been particularly romantic. In fact, he was hardly sure this even qualified as a date. As of this moment, they were almost friends, which suited George just fine.

Angelina came walking up to the pair of them, seating herself down next to Meg in the sand. "Hello, you two," she said brightly. "You haven't seen where Fred went, have you?"

"Er… no," Meg said, looking around the beach. "Maybe he…"

But she was cut off by a faint yelling coming from the ocean. "Help! Help!!" They all peered off into the distance, and George felt his blood run cold as he spotted a vivid red head far out to sea, disappearing between the waves –

"FRED!!" George yelled, pulling off his shoes so he could swim out. "Hold on, I'm coming!" Behind him, Angelina was crying, "What? What's going on?" and Meg had already dove in the water, swimming hard toward the place where Fred had vanished.

George paddled frantically, trying to get out to his brother. Why had he ever suggested this outing? He hadn't been thinking clearly when he had said it; he had been at a loss for something to do with Meg… and now look what his stupidity had gotten Fred into. A million things could have gone wrong with this trip; instead of thinking about what Meg might like to do, he should have been thinking about ways to spend time with Fred that weren't likely to end in this sort of… life-threatening accident (he refused to think of it as fatal, not when he had no proof Fred wasn't still alive). He kept swimming as hard as he could, praying that he hadn't just gotten his brother killed.

Meg was a faster swimmer than George was, and she had dived down to get Fred even as George was still struggling to get that far out. He arrived just as she surfaced, gasping for breath and dragging Fred behind her by his hair. "Is he all right?" George yelled over the sound of the waves.

"I don't know!" she said, almost as terrified as he was. "I don't think he's breathing!" Fear gripped George's stomach tightly, but he couldn't let it take over; they had to get his brother back to shore to try and save his life… even if the chances were incredibly slim. He helped her take Fred back to shore, both of them gripping one of his arms tightly and swimming as quickly as they could; they didn't have a moment to waste.

As they got nearer, Angelina, her eyes wide with terror, ran out to help them carry Fred to the beach, where they laid him flat on his back to try and revive him. "Oh my God!" she sobbed, while Meg tried to search for a pulse. "Oh my God, what happened to him?"

"He got dragged underwater by the current," she said, out of breath, as she tilted Fred's head back and blew two breaths into his mouth. "I can't find a pulse!" she continued, starting to compress his chest.

George watched, helpless, as this girl he hadn't known until today tried to save the person he cared about most in the world. Angelina, her hands covering her mouth, said, "What do we do? How are we…?"

"Angelina, you've got to go get help," Meg said, still trying to find a pulse. "Can you…"

"I'll go find a Healer," Angelina said, nodding feverishly as she Disapparated to the nearest Wizarding hospital.

"Did it work?" George asked Meg anxiously, as she tilted his head back once more to check for breathing. She shook her head, her brow furrowed with concentration as she began another round of CPR. George watched anxiously; but as he knelt by Fred's head, all he could think about were Fred's words to him earlier that morning.

_Maybe _you're_ supposed to do me in today, then!_

"No…" George moaned, unable to tear his eyes away from Fred's face. "No… please… please don't let that be true!" He grabbed Fred by the shoulders, shaking him slightly. "Fred, listen to me! Listen! You can't leave me here… please don't let this be my fault… are you listening? You – cannot – leave!" He waited, horrorstruck, for his twin to show some sign of life… a sign that, as the minutes passed, seemed more and more unlikely to manifest itself.

---

"The patient seems to be suffering from delusions, Healer Shepherd," said the trainee Healer, looking down at Percy's unconscious form. "He seems to think that he's meant to help save someone's life… someone who's in danger…"

"Whether or not that person is really in danger is irrelevant," said Healer Shepherd indifferently, waving his wand over Percy's skull in a complicated fashion, performing Legilimency as a sort of diagnostic test. "All that matters is figuring out how to stop him from…"

He froze in disbelief as Legilimency showed him Percy's visions, and he came to comprehend their implications. It was impossible… and yet…

"What is it?" asked Healer Grey anxiously. Healer Shepherd turned towards her.

"He's telling the truth," he said numbly. "He's been seeing the future… and all this time, he's been trying to stop his brother from being killed."

"He's not crazy?" Healer Grey gasped. "But then, I guess we should discharge him, if he hasn't really lost his mind…"

"We can't," said Healer Shepherd heavily. "These visions… they're destroying his mind, and if they continue, he'll be beyond any of our help. He _is _losing his mind, but it's because of what he's seeing. If they've only been continuing for five days and he's already this bad…" He trailed off significantly. "We have to end these… these premonitions in order to preserve his sanity."

"But… then his brother will die," said Healer Grey uncertainly. Healer Shepherd looked at her intently.

"His brother is the one who committed him," he said seriously. "He knew what this could mean if we got rid of young Percy's visions… that he could die." He paused to let the implications of his words sink in. "The brother knew what he was getting himself into."

---

Fred opened his eyes to a great white room, filled with fog that obscured everything around him. "Hello?" he called into the silence. "Is anyone there? Where am I? And more importantly, how can I get out of here?"

Someone was walking toward him through the smoke; as he got nearer, familiar features began to manifest themselves: tattered robes, a familiar face that was prematurely lined, graying hair. Fred knew who was coming toward him… but no… this was the last thing he wanted to see… because if this person was here with him, it meant that…

"Professor Lupin?" he gasped, staring at the newcomer. Lupin smiled.

"Hello, Fred," he said mildly. Fred shook his head in disbelief.

"No," he said frantically. "No… you can't be here, you're dead! And if you're dead, that means that…" He trailed off, trying to remember what Harry had told his family about his walk into the forest. Could he really be in – as Harry had put it – King's Cross Station? Because that was the last place he wanted to be right now… he still had a family out there that cared about him, and he had finally realized that he wasn't ready to leave them yet…

"Calm down, Fred," said Lupin, looking almost amused at Fred's reaction to his arrival.

Fred ignored him; he was running his hands through his hair in a panic. "How the bloody hell do you expect me to calm down when I just found out I'm _dead_?" he shouted at Lupin.

Surprisingly, Lupin laughed at him. "Don't be ridiculous," he explained, smiling. "You're not dead, Fred."

Fred blinked in surprise. "I'm… I'm not?" he asked blankly, after a stunned pause. "But… but I drowned! My head went under the waves and I swallowed all this water…"

"Perhaps, but you never really died. Once again, help came at the last possible moment," Lupin explained. "The moment the water hit your lungs, Meg pulled you out of the water and saved your life."

"Meg?" Fred repeated uncomprehendingly.

"The girl you wasted all morning looking for ended up saving you," Lupin explained, still smiling vaguely. "Funny how things turned out, isn't it?"

"Hilarious," Fred replied sarcastically, frowning as he tried to digest this new information. "So… I'm still alive, then?" Lupin nodded. "So how… how did you get here?"

"I suppose this encounter could be best described as a dream," Lupin replied slowly. "So because you're not dead, you won't be given the option to go back or move on the way Harry was… you've got to go back either way."

"What's the point?" laughed Fred humorlessly. "I'm going to die, and no one can stop it… so why on earth do I have to go back there and await some other way to die?"

"Because you have no idea _why_ you must die," Lupin said patiently. "You've been aimlessly self-destructive as of late; how are you supposed to sacrifice yourself without having a good reason?"

"Does it really matter why?" Fred collapsed on the ground, lacking the energy to remain standing. "All that really matters is that I'm not going to live to see twenty-one. I don't really care about the reasons…"

Lupin knelt to his level to look him straight in the eyes. "If you don't care about the reasons why you have to die, then why did you bring me here to explain things to you?"

Fred looked at him. "_You_ know?" he whispered. "You know the… the reason for all this?" Lupin nodded somberly. "But… how would you…"

"When you die, you can see everything clearly," Lupin explained. "You're given the ability to examine the past… see the future… you can analyze how simple changes made in the past can completely alter upcoming events."

Fred looked at him, trying to understand what he meant. "So… so when I survived the battle, are you saying that screwed up the future somehow?"

"It's already screwed up the future," Lupin sighed, now sitting cross-legged across from Fred. "When Percy saved you from that falling wall during the battle, it set off a chain of events that will ultimately change the Wizarding world forever." Fred just stared at him in shock, so Lupin sighed again and began to explain.

"This is what would have happened if you'd died in the battle." With a wave of his hand, Lupin made the billowing fog condense into one solid, shimmering shape; and as the two of them stared, images began to appear in the cloud of smoke. Fred watched with bated breath as he saw himself and Percy, battling the two Death Eaters, saw as Harry, Ron, and Hermione appeared as they rounded the corner; saw himself laughing as Percy made some sort of stupid joke; and then he practically felt the tremors as one of the castle walls fell in on him, felt some sort of strangely familiar pang in his heart as it stopped beating. He felt tears spring to his own eyes, watching Ron and Percy sob over him; and then Percy looked up abruptly with murder in his eyes and roared the single word: "ROOKWOOD!" and sprinted off down the corridor…

The scene faded and Fred looked up at Lupin, the image of his own corpse still haunting him. If Percy had been seeing nothing but that for the past five days, it was no wonder he had lost his mind.

"I don't understand," he finally said. Lupin raised his eyebrows in mild surprise.

"Don't you see?" he asked. "After you died, Percy blamed Rookwood for your death, and so he ran after him… and by the end of the battle, he had killed him."

"Okay…" said Fred slowly, still confused. "But how would his death save the Wizarding world?"

Lupin sighed and said, "Keep watching." And Fred turned back to the scene now presenting itself on the smokescreen: Rookwood turning up at Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place while Harry was out at the Ministry, withdrawing his wand with an evil snarl on his face… and casting a deadly curse at his little sister and the small, black-haired baby she held in her arms. Fred cried out in alarm, but Lupin silenced him with a look and silently indicated that he keep watching, so Fred turned back to the horror flashing on the screen, unable to feel anything but numb disbelief. He saw the grief and rage on the rest of his family's faces at her funeral… then the scene cut to Arthur and all six Weasley brothers pursuing Rookwood and finally killing him… but not before Rookwood took Ron and George down with him.

"NO!" Fred fell to his knees, tears running down his cheeks in earnest now. "Not Ginny… and Ron… _George…_"

"There's more!" Lupin growled, a sort of intensity on his face that Fred had never seen before; and against his will, Fred looked up in fear to see what fresh horrors this new future had in store. Harry Potter was standing alone at the graves of his best friend and his wife and son… and yet his face was strangely devoid of the grief that Fred would have expected, but rather full of an ugly sort of determination that made chills run down Fred's spine. Fred saw a rapid succession of images of Harry poring over books of Dark Magic, inventing spells that attempted to reawaken the dead, his features eventually contorting and blurring into an unrecognizable being as he gave more and more of his soul trying to bring back all the people he had lost, even killing other innocent people in the process… Hermione appeared, trying to talk him out of his madness, but Harry coldly drew out his wand and killed her too, without a second thought…

"I don't think you need to see any more," Lupin said quietly, vanishing the images with a wave of his hand.

Fred turned back to Lupin, trying to make sense of all he had seen. "What happens to Harry?" he asked, afraid of the answer.

Lupin hesitated, then said, not looking at Fred, "He becomes the most powerful Dark Wizard the world has ever known… worse even than Lord Voldemort. He begins a Third Wizarding War, far worse than the first two… and no one in your family – not your parents, or Bill, or Charlie, or Percy… or even you – survives."

"But… but that won't happen for a while, right?" Fred asked desperately. "So I'd have more time…"

"You would sacrifice your entire family – your _twin_ – hundreds of innocent witches and wizards… just to buy yourself a few extra years?" Lupin roared, in a sudden blazing fury that made Fred recoil. "Only a coward would do something like that, and… you may be many things, but you are not a coward, Fred Weasley! You _have_ to die, and Rookwood has to be blamed and punished for it… it's the only way this can be prevented!"

"That can't be the _only_ way," said Fred skeptically. "What if… what if _I_ kill Rookwood?"

Lupin shook his head. "He'd kill you first," he said sadly.

"Well… is it so important that someone in my family kills him? I mean, what if the Aurors catch up to him before he can ever get to Ginny?"

"They won't," Lupin said simply. He was looking at Fred very seriously, even as Fred was trying to find out some other way to avoid this horrible future.

"You said I'm supposed to die?" he asked in a whisper. "Well, maybe… maybe you were wrong! Maybe _that_ – " he pointed a shaking finger at the screen where Lupin had shown him Ginny's death – "is what's supposed to happen, not me dying…"

Lupin laughed derisively. "You were so eager to die just a few hours ago… what's made you change your mind?"

"I'm not ready!" Fred cried. "I'm… I'm too young, I'm leaving too much behind… there are so many things I haven't gotten to do yet! I've got too much living to do to even _think_ about dying!"

"That's what I thought too," Lupin said grimly, "until I was hit by Dolohov's curse."

"You've got to be wrong about me," said Fred, shaking his head furiously. "What did I ever do to deserve death?"

"This is not about what you do or don't deserve!" cried Lupin. "It's about making sacrifices to make the world a better place! If you had died in the battle like you were supposed to, then none of _that"_ – he pointed at the screen – "would have happened, and the people you love as well as the people you will never meet can live ordinary lives, free from fear."

"But since I lived," Fred said slowly, "because Percy… saved me, and I didn't die like I was supposed to… does that mean that – that what you showed me up there… is inevitable? Is it already too late to stop that from happening?"

Lupin looked down, apparently trying to determine how best to explain himself. "Fortunately, events have already been set in motion that can correct Percy's… mistake. He's certainly complicated the situation… and made it much harder for you to do what you have to, I imagine," he added, looking sadly at Fred. "But if everything goes according to plan, then no one will suffer, no one will die… no one, that is, except the people who are already supposed to be dead."

"Like me and Rookwood," Fred murmured to himself. He looked intently at Lupin. "So are you saying that… that all these accidents that have been happening to me have been part of this 'plan'? And…" He paused, trying to understand. His death was somehow supposed to make Percy want to kill Rookwood… but what did that have to do with the fire, or the lightning, or the earthquake? None of them had had anything to do with Rookwood… if he had nearly drowned today, for instance, why would that have made Percy want to kill Augustus Rookwood?

Lupin seemed to sense what Fred was thinking, so he said, "All those accidents – the fire, the earthquake, the shower…"

"Shower?" Fred interrupted suddenly, confused.

"Yesterday you were supposed to fall in the shower and break your neck," Lupin explained quickly, almost dismissively. "But anyway… none of those were meant to kill you."

"Are you kidding me?" Fred yelled, jumping up to his feet. "The whole time Percy was having those visions of me dead, and I was feeling like… like I _should_ be dead… none of that was real?"

"Well…" Lupin hesitated. "The events themselves were real, and Percy's visions of their… _outcome_ were real, but the threat to your life wasn't there."

Fred gaped at him; what was he talking about? Percy's premonitions of his death had to go hand in hand with a threat to his life, didn't they? "Huh?" he asked intelligently.

"All those times, Percy was _supposed _to help you, so he did," Lupin explained patiently. "As for the way you were feeling… well, that's the sort of cognitive dissonance anyone who meddles with fate has; it was left over from the fact that you survived the battle when you instinctively knew you weren't supposed to. The purpose of all those accidents was to unbalance Percy's mind, though he thought they were to end your life; they landed him in the mental hospital where Rookwood will kill you when you go to visit your brother. You nearly drowned today so you could have this meeting with me, so you don't march off blindly to your own destruction without understanding why – do you understand now?"

"But what if I had died during any of those freak accidents?" Fred asked, still struggling to make sense of it all. "Then the whole plan would be ruined, and Rookwood would go free…"

"You wouldn't have," Lupin told him. "Percy was always there looking out for you… and once he was put away, you made sure you would survive drowning by bringing Meg along with you… though, to be sure, neither you nor George had no idea why you were bringing her," he added as an afterthought. "Everything over the past few days has happened very deliberately, with the end – your end – in mind."

Fred paused. "You say that… I'm going to get killed at the mental hospital visiting Percy?" Lupin nodded grimly.

"Only this time, Rookwood really will be responsible," he said, his voice shaking slightly. "You walk out of the ward and…" He trailed off. "Well, I shouldn't tell you too many details… if you know too much, you might not have the courage to face what you've known for a long time is coming."

"Back up a second," said Fred suddenly. "What do you mean, 'this time, Rookwood really will be responsible'? Didn't he also kill me in the battle?"

Lupin hesitated for a fraction of a second too long. "Does it really matter if Rookwood was responsible or not?" he asked quietly. "All that matters is that Percy _thought_ he was responsible, so he went after him…"

"Then who was responsible?"

Lupin avoided his eyes.

"Remus!" Fred seized Lupin by the front of his robes. _"Who killed me?_" Slowly, Lupin met his eyes.

"I told you, it doesn't matter who really was responsible," he said slowly. "It's in the past, anyway… it's got nothing to do with…"

"You said you learn things when you die; about the past, how events affect the future… you have to know who did it!" Lupin closed his eyes as though trying to fight back tears. "_Tell me!_" Fred roared; true, it was no longer important, but he at least had to know who his family should have blamed for his death in the Battle of Hogwarts.

Slowly, shakily, Lupin's eyes met Fred's.

"It was an accident," he whispered. "I was… I was dueling Dolohov, and then I saw that Macnair was sending acromantula climbing up the castle walls." He paused to take a deep breath. "And I tried to curse one of them, to protect the students in the school from them, but… I missed. The curse hit the wall instead of the spider… made the wall explode…"

Fred's head was spinning. _"You?"_ he repeated in disbelief. Lupin nodded heavily, tears coursing down his cheeks.

"I had no idea what I had done until… until I died," he explained. "I turned my back on Dolohov to try and get the acromantula… and the moment after I had cast my curse, he cast his… on me." He looked at Fred with true remorse in his eyes. "I'm sorry," he said, his voice breaking. "It was an accident, I swear…"

"It's not your fault," Fred said quietly, giving Lupin a brief, forgiving half-smile before looking pensive once more. "Like you said, it was meant to happen… even if you were the vehicle for causing my death, you can't say it was your fault… it wasn't anyone's fault." He paused; he had only one more unanswered question, before he felt he would have enough reason to truly face his death. For this time, he would face Rookwood himself, and there could be no escape from his destiny this time; he knew what he had to do, and why.

"Just one last thing," he said to Lupin. He swallowed nervously. _"Why me?"_

---

"Come on, Fred, don't quit on me now!" Meg muttered, still trying CPR on the unresponsive body. George had turned away long ago, sitting with his knees pulled up to his chest, his face buried in his arms.

"Just give it up already!" he shouted at her, wiping away his tears. "He's gone, he's _dead,_ and nothing you do is going to – "

But just as he had begun to believe that Fred really had gone, the body Meg had been trying to revive for the past ten minutes gave a great jolt, spewing out a great spout of water and coughing furiously. George's eyes widened.

"Let me through!" he shouted, pushing Meg aside to get to Fred. "Fred? Fred, can you hear me?"

Fred's only response was to groan, still coughing roughly.

"And that's why we need Extendable Arms," he said weakly to George, opening his eyes the tiniest crack, so that George could barely see the sliver of brown between the eyelids.

"What… what do you mean?" George asked, grinning even through his confusion.

"Well…" Fred slowly sat up, holding his head. "If we had them, you could have just reached out in the middle of the ocean and…" He mimicked plucking something. "…pulled me out, like _that_!"

George was laughing and crying with relief, overjoyed that Fred was still with him. "Oh Fred!" he choked around his tears, holding his twin close to him. "I'm so glad you're still here!"

Slowly, Fred reached his arms around George, returning the hug with the same sort of ferocity. "That makes two of us," he said, his voice muffled in George's shoulder. And the Weasley twins held each other tightly, savoring this moment, the moment George felt might be the last thing they would ever share – even as he didn't want to believe it. Fred had been saved from drowning, but did that mean his brushes with death were at an end? Somehow, George didn't think so. In a way, he wanted this mess to be over as much as Fred did… and at the same time, he didn't want to lose Fred forever. He was being selfish, he knew… yet he didn't care.

"Meg… I can't thank you enough for saving my life," Fred said over George's shoulder. "I know this whole ordeal must have been horrible for you…"

"Well… it was fine until you almost died," she replied, smiling gently. "But I'm glad I came… I'm glad I was able to help out." She checked her watch and quickly paled. "I'm sorry… I have to go… it's later than I thought it was." She looked apologetically at George.

"I understand," he told her quickly; he knew how awkward it was to be the third party during a personal moment like the one he and Fred were having.

"Don't be a stranger, you hear?" Fred said, grinning. She nodded, smiling, and waved goodbye to George as she Disapparated.

Angelina reappeared just then, looking terrified and frazzled. "Someone's on their way…" she began before catching sight of her boyfriend, alive and well for the moment. "Fred!" she gasped, grabbing Fred tightly and forcing George to let go of him. "Thank God you're all right!"

Fred gave her a small, sad smile before pushing her away. "Ange… we need to talk," he said quietly. George got the feeling that he shouldn't be overhearing this, but he couldn't bring himself to leave Fred's side… not after he had almost lost him, and when he knew he was about to lose him for real… Nevertheless, he retreated a small distance away that gave him the advantage of being able to hear their conversation without appearing like he was really eavesdropping. He picked up a seashell and pretended to be fascinated by it, but in reality he was hanging onto their every word.

"Talk about what?" said Angelina, looking puzzled, yet not as concerned as she perhaps should be, George thought privately.

Fred paused for a long time, during which George vaguely wondered if he was going to explain what had been happening to him over the past few days. "Ange… I can't do this," he whispered.

"You can't do what?" she asked, still not concerned.

"This… _us…_ I can't do it anymore," he said in a very small voice. Her eyes widened in shock.

"What?" she asked numbly. "Why the hell not?" She was already beginning to get angry. Fred didn't answer, couldn't even meet her eyes to explain why he had to break up with her. George was still pretending not to listen, but he couldn't help but share Angelina's feelings. What was going on? Fred had just lived through a terrible ordeal, and now he was making life hard for himself by ditching Angelina?

"It's… complicated," he attempted, still refusing to look her in the eye. "But trust me when I say it's for the best…"

She was shaking her head, beside herself with anger. "Why?" she asked through clenched teeth. "At least have the courtesy to tell me _why_ you think you can just walk out after four years!"

"Because we're…" Fred gave a shuddering sigh, finally getting up the nerve to look at her through tear-filled eyes. "We're not supposed to be together, Ange," he said, his voice breaking. "I'm sorry… I wish there was something else I could do, but this was the only way I could think of to give you any sort of closure…"

Angelina slapped him across the face furiously, tears running down her face almost against her will. "You expect us to be over just like that?" she hissed. Fred didn't answer; he didn't even turn his head to look back at her. She shook her head in contempt.

"I never want to see you again, Fred Weasley," she said in a low voice just before she Disapparated. George was staring at the spot where she had vanished, horror-struck. Fred and Angelina had been one of the constant things in their life; how could they suddenly be over?

Slowly, Fred reached a hand to the side of his face and lightly touched where she had slapped him. "Don't worry," he whispered, more to himself than to anyone else, a few tears leaking out of his own eyes. "You won't." George got up, walked over to his twin, and hugged him tightly once more, trying to absorb some of the pain he was in, to somehow lighten his burden, even if doing so was impossible.


End file.
